Addressing shortages in health care providers, specifically in rural areas is a focus area for Aurora BayCare Medical Center. The University of Medicine and Public Health Wisconsin Academy for Rural Medicine (WARM) program is a competitive program, admitting applicants who demonstrate a strong commitment to practice medicine in rural Wisconsin. Admission is limited 26 residents from Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota or Michigan. Aurora BayCare Medical Center serves as a training site for the WARM program and hosted 12 students in 2021.
In addition to serving as a WARM training site for assigned students, Aurora BayCare hosted an Advanced Wilderness Life Support (AWLS) training in Fall 2021, which they will host again in fall 2022. This course welcomes 25 WARM students from across Wisconsin. The course is largely taught by the hospital’s emergency medical physicians and focuses on low resource medicine.
Additionally, the hospital’s WARM students have been directly engaged with the community in a number of ways this past year, including participation in:
- Compress & Shock classes teaching basic CPR skills to community members
- Stop the Bleed presentations to a local high school shop class
- Sturgeon Bay YMCA Diabetes Prevention Program presentation
- Docs Ought to Care (DOC) presentations to science classes at local high schools involving real animal organs
- Narcan Training to local high school students
- Staffing rest stations at BayCare Century race. One of our WARM students took first place in the race itself!
Participation in the WARM program is just one way Aurora BayCare is helping to train providers prepared to help care for rural patients.