U of A to pursue other partnerships like new Yuma medical school branch

Onvida Health will invest nearly $33 million over eight years in the University of Arizona’s new medical school branch in Yuma because of the severe need for primary-care doctors in rural areas — and the UA is interested in similar partnerships in other communities.

“Arizona is in the lowest 10 states in terms of primary care physicians per population,” said Fredric Wondisford, dean of UA’s College of Medicine — Phoenix, which will partner with Onvida in the new venture. “It’s particularly problematic in the rural areas of our state.”

Starting in July 2026, the college will offer a three-year Primary Care Accelerated Pathway program at the new branch in partnership with Onvida Health Yuma Medical Center, to lead students to an M.D. or doctor of medicine degree. It is the state's first medical school branch in a rural area. 

Onvida Health’s total investment will exceed $4 million in the program’s first full year, including more than $800,000 in full-tuition scholarships as well as operating support, facilities, technology and clinical resources.

Its total investment will be $32.9 million over eight years.

Rural communities have a very hard time recruiting physicians and retaining them, Wondisford said, but programs like this help by putting medical students in a community and linking them to residencies where the students do their advanced clinical training.

“Academic presence is important for the recruitment of physicians,” Robert Trenschel, president and CEO of Onvida Health, told the Star on Thursday. “Particularly if we can train physicians specifically in rural health, that want to practice in a rural area, that want to focus on primary care; if we can train those individuals and educate them here, and then hopefully have them stay here.”

Wondisford described why the area has a particularly strong need.

“There is a distribution shortage of primary care physicians throughout the state, but particularly on the periphery of the state. So, Yuma is in an area where anywhere from 50% to 75% of the county doesn’t have a primary care physician,” he told the Star in an interview Thursday. “On top of that, Yuma is in an area that has the highest social vulnerability index — a measure of poverty, lack of access to transportation, crowded housing, all of those.”

Statewide, “Arizona meets about 40% of its primary care physician need, which means it doesn’t meet 60% of the need, and it ranks 42^nd out of 50 states in the number of active primary care physicians,” Wondisford said.

The state needs nearly 500 additional physicians to meet current health-care demands, according to data from the Arizona Graduate Medical Education Policy Brief.

Fred DuVal, whose father, Merlin “Monte” DuVal, founded UA’s College of Medicine in Tucson, is on the Arizona Board of Regents that oversees the state’s three universities. He said the Yuma program will be a source of enormous pride.

The numbers in rural Arizona are catastrophic, and the inadequate distribution of medical talent makes this program more significant, he told the Star.

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As the distances to affordable care grow, DuVal said tracking finds that more and more care is avoided, with sometimes “utterly awful” and potentially fatal consequences. The situation also leads people into emergency rooms, which is both the most expensive point of care and also at a point in time where good outcomes are less likely, he said.

“We will seek to replicate this (partnership) model in other parts of rural Arizona, but it requires a big enough urban area and a provider that can afford it,” said DuVal. "We're working on that."

Wondisford agreed, saying UA’s College of Medicine is in talks with other communities with similar aspirations and that once the Yuma program starts, it’ll be clear to policymakers and communities that this is a good way to get physicians into a community.

At the new Yuma branch, 15 students per year and 45 students over the first three years will receive full-tuition scholarships.

“That sounds like a niche number but it’s really not, because you need to be sure that the regional campus gets up and running, and that the students are successful,” said Wondisford.

The first 18 months of the program will be held at the Phoenix campus, and the second 18 will be at the Yuma medical center for clinical training across eight core specialties, including critical care rotations. Onvida Health has the capacity to accommodate 300 rotations annually, making it possible for other UA colleges to also send students for rotations at the site in addition to the primary care program, said a UA news release Thursday.

“In the second 18 months, that’s what we call clerkship training — we are actually in a clinical setting with patients doing different clerkships like internal medicine, pediatrics, or OB/GYN (obstetrics and gynecology),” said Wondisford.

The Yuma branch will offer a three-year rather than a four-year program to train doctors.

Students in four-year medical programs typically have more debt when they come out of medical school, Wondisford said, and the fourth year is spent deciding their specialization in medicine. He said in a three-year program, the students have already decided their specializations by the end, and if they’re on a primary care track, they’ve already decided if they’re going into family medicine, internal medicine or pediatrics.

Trenschel said the Onvida Health Yuma Medical Center is a large hospital with 406 beds, 180 miles from anybody that does what it does. It already has robust training programs — family medicine residency program, sports medicine training program, psychiatry residency program — and the foundational elements of medical education, he said.

“We have a robust primary care outpatient and specialty network,” he added. “We do everything here except transplant, burn and neurosurgery ... and to have it in a rural area and so isolated is even more unique," which means there's "a great platform to build upon the training that we’ve already established.”

Onvida’s goal in the future is to have a full medical-school campus there, Trenschel said, similar to how the UA branched off into Phoenix.