The purpose of the Rural Residency Planning and Development (RRPD) program is to improve and expand access to health care in rural areas by developing new sustainable rural residency programs, including rural track programs (RTPs).
These residency programs must achieve accreditation from the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME). Newly created rural residency programs will increase the number of future physicians training in rural areas, and ultimately the number of physicians practicing in rural areas with the goal of addressing the physician workforce shortages in rural communities.
The RRPD program provides start-up funding to create new rural residency programs in qualifying medical specialties that will be sustainable long-term through viable and stable funding mechanisms, such as Medicare, Medicaid, and other public or private funding sources. Qualifying medical specialties are family medicine, internal medicine, preventive medicine, psychiatry, general surgery, and obstetrics and gynecology.
For this notice of funding opportunity (NOFO), rural residency programs:
•Are accredited physician residency programs.
•Train residents in clinical training sites that are physically located in a rural area as defined by HRSA’s Federal Office of Rural Health Policy (FORHP) [1] for greater than 50 percent of their total time in residency.
•Focus on producing physicians who will practice in rural communities.
The purpose of the RRPD Program is to fund the development of new rural residency programs in qualifying medical specialties. For this funding opportunity, we consider “new” programs to include both programs seeking accreditation for the first time and existing programs that apply for a permanent complement increase to train additional residents at new rural training site(s) as part of an RTP. To be responsive to the program purpose and be considered for funding, you must propose a new rural residency program in a qualifying medical specialty. For this funding opportunity, we do not consider the following to be new programs:
•Programs that have received accreditation or a permanent complement increase for their proposed rural residency program before the application due date.
•Programs seeking to increase resident full-time equivalents at an existing RTP site without adding a new rural training site.
