A Birmingham family has given $10 million to the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Marnix E. Heersink School of Medicine to train primary care physicians to work in rural communities.
Mike and Gillian Goodrich made the donation that will establish Goodrich Rural Innovation in Training for Alabama, or GRIT, to be used to underwrite educational scholarships, provide programmatic support to new rural residency training programs and strengthen rural clinic capacity where training will occur.
The University of Alabama System Board of Trustees must approve the donation that also establishes the Goodrich Endowed Chair in Rural Health and Primary Care.
The funding is organized around four primary areas — leadership in rural health and primary care, expanded residency programming, scholarship support, and investment in the clinics and training sites where care is delivered — to benefit the places where care has grown most challenging to find, UAB said in a statement.
The Goodriches partnered with Dr. Anupam Agarwal, senior vice president for Medicine and dean of the UAB Heersink School of Medicine, to form the program after “witnessing rural Alabama lose ground for the better part of a generation,” the statement said.
“For a number of years, Gillian and I have been concerned about access to quality healthcare in rural Alabama,” said Mike Goodrich. “Small-town hospitals are closing or reducing services to local citizens. We have worked with Dr. Agarwal and his team to develop a comprehensive program that will attract and retain primary care residents and physicians in rural communities.”
Dr. Irfan Asif, chair of the Department of Family and Community Medicine and associate dean of Primary Care and Rural Health at UAB, helped build GRIT into a comprehensive pathway that supports learners from early exposure through training and into practice.
“UAB is uniquely positioned to lead this effort due to the reach of our health system, a strong training infrastructure and a deep commitment to serving every corner of the state. This is what’s possible when philanthropy and academic medicine align around a shared purpose: to create lasting impact for Alabama.”
Read more about the program here.
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