Valued Voice

There will be two new Graduate Medical Education (GME) programs in Wisconsin thanks to $1.5 million in funding awarded by the Wisconsin Department of Health Service to the Gundersen Lutheran Medical Foundation and to the Medical College of Wisconsin. This funding is part of the “Grow Our Own” grant program spearheaded by WHA in 2013 and recently updated at the urging of the association with the enactment of Senate Bill 643 as 2023 Wisconsin Act 185.   

With their funding, the Gundersen Lutheran Medical Foundation will build and implement a new Psychiatry Residency over the next five state fiscal years.  By the end of the grant timeframe, this residency will graduate 12 new psychiatrists for Wisconsin and three new psychiatrists each year thereafter.

With their funding, the Medical College of Wisconsin will build and implement a Behavioral Health Fellowship for family medicine physicians over the next five state fiscal years. By the end of the grant timeframe, as many as nine family practice physicians will have completed a psychiatry fellowship and there will be two or three additional family practice physicians with this behavioral health specialty training graduating each year thereafter.

Since its inception over a decade ago, the “Grow Our Own” Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) program has funded the creation of 23 new residency programs in 51 Wisconsin counties, with 86 new physicians every year graduating from the grant-supported training pipeline. You can find more information about the Graduate Medical Education grants, including a map and listing of all grant recipients, on the WHA website. 

“Grow Our Own” training grants are based on WHA’s data-driven 86% equation: Wisconsin-raised, Wisconsin-educated and Wisconsin-trained physicians have an 86% chance of staying in Wisconsin to practice. If they cannot find a residency spot in Wisconsin, the likelihood they will practice here drops by 30%. The success of the GME grants prompted the creation of similar matching grant programs for allied health and advanced practice clinician training programs. With the recent grant awards the program will near a public-private investment of $100 million in growing Wisconsin’s health care workforce.

You can contact WHA’s Ann Zenk if you have questions about “Grow Our Own” grants or any other health care workforce issue.