Jackie Krentzman is a Bay Area-based writer and editor.

When Dr. Jerry Hizon graduated from medical school and moved to Temecula in the 1980s, the nearest hospital was 15 miles away. To his knowledge, he was the only doctor practicing in the city. Today, the city of 110,000 in southwest Riverside County is still federally classified as a medically underserved community, with residents routinely traveling for hours even for primary care. But Hizon and a city-run workforce program are changing that.

Founded in 2013, the Medical Career Pathway & Future Physician Leaders program aims to support students living in or from Temecula who are interested in pursuing a career as a physician, physician assistant, or nurse. Over 1,000 college and high school students have graduated from the program, which is modeled after a similar initiative in Coachella Valley.

“We wanted to find a way to give young people in Temecula access to a career pathway that may seem intimidating to them,” said Charles Walker, who manages the city’s workforce development programs.

In addition to managing and marketing the program, the city brought stakeholders together to get the program running. The goal is to motivate participants to return to the (relatively) remote community to practice. Doctors from the area understand the local community and how to practice inclusive, culturally sensitive medicine that increases access to care, Hizon said.

“It is really, really hard to get physicians to come practice in this area of the state,” said Hizon, the program’s technical director. “So, the best way to get them is to develop homegrown talent, people who want to raise their families here.”

The program is divided into two segments: Future Physician Leaders for college students or recent graduates and Medical Career Pathways for high school students. Each program runs six evenings a week in the summer at the Temecula Valley Entrepreneur’s Exchange, an incubator for local businesses in the old city hall building. Participants pay $25, which helps cover the cost of the dinner provided at the start of each session.

Joyce Navarro is a graduate of both programs. Navarro, currently a medical assistant at a local OB/GYN clinic and a medical scribe at Loma Linda Hospital, is applying for medical school. She said the program was instrumental in confirming her instinct to pursue a career as a doctor.

“By hearing what their day-to-day work life is like and learning more about the broad range of medical professions and all the different specialty areas convinced me that medicine was the right field for me,” she said.

Navarro also appreciates that the Future Physician Leaders program gave her guidance on how to get into medical school.

“The program focused on the nuts and bolts, such as how to apply, which extracurriculars to boost my resume, and how to get a gap year job while applying,” Navarro said. “Without this information, I wouldn’t have known how to do any of it.”

Typically, the 40 students in the college-age cohort are applying for graduate school and seeking an edge over the competition, along with exposure to different medical careers and mentoring opportunities. It consists of three elements: classroom lessons, leadership, and physician shadowing. The high school program, with roughly 50 students, is similar but does not include physician shadowing.

Hizon noted that as the program has gained visibility in the local medical community, providers have been eager to participate. The format is hands-on and interactive, meant to be not only informative, but lively and fun. The classroom component layers on what he calls the “petting zoo,” where students learn how to perform basic medical procedures, such as suturing a wound, putting a cast on a model, or interpreting an X-ray. The students also learn first aid and CPR.

“We call it edutainment, as it is meant to be educational, yet entertaining, because the worst thing for a young learner is to be bored,” Hizon said.

For the community service and leadership segment, students create a community health project directed at improving health care and healthcare access locally. Projects have included encouraging adolescents to stop vaping, collating information on chronic illnesses and preventative health, and creating posters or a website.

When 2016 program participant Austin Kordic, now a fellow in hematology and oncology at Los Angeles City of Hope, learned that many residents were using the emergency room for primary care because they didn’t know how to access other services, he assembled a list of reduced and no-cost community health resources in the Temecula area and created a brochure.

“That taught me how to think about how to translate a problem I see in the medical system into a tangible product that can help remedy that problem,” Kordic said.

The final component for college-age students is to shadow a physician at one of four regional hospitals, including Temecula Valley Hospital.

“My favorite part of the program was shadowing,” Kordic said. “Not only did we learn exactly what doctors do on their rotation, I even got to observe heart surgeries.”

The program also provides other ancillary benefits — primarily networking and mentoring. Speakers often encourage students to reach out to them.

“When you are in the early phase of your career, if you don’t have close family or friends in the field, you don’t have guidance of how to navigate the process of getting into medical school, and then how to utilize your skills and degree to best help your community,” said Kordic. “The insights from the speakers were invaluable.”

The ultimate measure of the program’s success, said Walker, is in the real world. Hundreds of graduates are currently working in medical professions or in medical school.

“We’ve had some of our city hall staff members go to the hospital unexpectedly and been treated by our graduates,” he said. “When they tell them ‘I’m here because of this program,’ we all have the opportunity to feel proud and reinforce our mission in creating this program.