Alaska has opened enrollment to a program aimed at attracting medical and health care practitioners, particularly for those providing care to underserved populations. The program, known as SHARP, offers repayments for education loans or direct financial incentives.
SHARP’s Program Director, Robert Sewell, spoke to KSRM on Tuesday to discuss why such efforts are important: “The State of Alaska, overall, in pretty much every community and most employers, struggled to get and keep adequate health care talent. That’s true for medical, dental, and behavioral health, and some other occupations that are closely related. This is a problem that’s been going on for decades and it’s become more acute, we think, in recent times, meaning the last few years… So, we need to think more about recruiting and retaining, meaning recruiting from other states. We’re a net-import state. We have been, and we’re going to be.”
He highlighted why this program allows for Alaska to be an attractive spot for the aforementioned imports, by being able to take the financial load from the shoulders of health care providers: “It depends upon which opportunity they elect, but either for two or three years, they get a quarterly payment. So, if they owe a bunch of education debt, we help them with that debt. It’s kind of a quid-pro-quo thing where they provide service in their place of employment and we then help them with the monkey on their back.”
Sewell recognized the importance of improved care in rural Alaska, and thinks SHARP’s strategy to play the long-game could break longstanding barriers: “Barriers that Alaskans know, pretty much all Alaskans know, geographic, climate, cultural barriers to accessing care. Those are real. They’re not going to go away. SHARP’s not going to fix them. But there are other kinds of things that we can do something about. One of those is to not only get more practitioners but also to help them be around long enough so that they get the vibe for rural or remote Alaska. So that they, maybe, make a home, or maybe make a family.”
More information for practitioners and employers interested in enrolling can be found at the Division of Public Health’s Alaska SHARP program.