The School of Medicine at the University of California, Riverside, has received a five-year, $2.3 million grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration Primary Care Training and Enhancement Program. The grant will allow the medical school to help transform the local health care system by embedding continuous quality improvement in inland Southern California primary care practices.

“We will deploy a research curriculum to equip medical students, residents, practicing physicians and pharmacists with the population health skills needed to address inland Southern California’s poor chronic disease metrics and health care disparities,” said the grant’s principal investigator and the associate dean of clinical affairs in the School of Medicine, Michael Nduati, M.D.

“We will expand the pipeline of future health care leaders through longitudinal interprofessional training. We also will ground lifelong faculty development into a new, integrated model of health care training towards improving the delivery of care to the inland Southern California community.”

Inland Southern California faces severe shortages of primary care physicians and poor health outcomes, particularly from chronic conditions like diabetes and coronary heart disease.

“We represent a large geographic region, which makes it more difficult to adequately staff health care providers to care for the population,” Dr. Nduti said. “Access to care is extremely limited for much of our community. But this grant will allow us to train across the spectrum from student to practitioner to hopefully affect a significant impact on the health of inland Southern California.”

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