Seventeen Year SCRIPT Program Takes Hiatus Due to State Budget Cuts
The South Carolina Area Health Education Consortium (AHEC) has found it necessary to place its SCRIPT program on hiatus for the 2011 fiscal year due to the South Carolina State Budget cut of the AHEC Health Professions Student Rural Infrastructure Development Funds. These funds have supported the continuation of SCRIPT since 2007 when the Quentin N. Burdick Program was removed from the federal budget. It is the hope of the SC AHEC that these funds will be restored by the state legislature so that SCRIPT may be held again in 2012.
Since 1993, the Bureau of Health Professions’ Quentin N. Burdick Program for Rural Interdisciplinary Training has funded SCRIPT. Lowcountry AHEC (one of the current 4 centers of South Carolina AHEC) was awarded its first Burdick grant and in 2000, Lowcountry AHEC received an additional SCRIPT grant from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Southern Rural Access Program, which was administered in South Carolina by the South Carolina Office of Rural Health. The RWJF grant allowed the program to go beyond the lowcountry of South Carolina by developing SCRIPT into a statewide program.
A total of 866 South Carolina health professions students have completed the SCRIPT program during the last 17 years (1994-2011). These students were from fourteen (14) health professions disciplines and seven South Carolina Universities. The breakdown of participation by discipline is as follows.
| Nursing |
Medicine |
Pharmacy |
Health Administration |
Physician Assistant |
Physical Therapy |
Speech Pathology |
| 228 |
182 |
150 |
60 |
52 |
33 |
32 |
OccupationalTherapy |
Dental |
Nutrition |
Advanced Practice Nursing |
Social Work |
Public Health |
Nurse Midwifery |
| 26 |
24 |
24 |
24 |
14 |
11 |
6 |
SCRIPT has shown that immersion of health professions students for a relatively short period of time (5 weeks) in rural, interdisciplinary, community-based health care increases their likelihood of working in interdisciplinary teams and selecting rural, underserved practice. Five SCRIPT alumni surveys were conducted in 2001, 2003, 2005, 2007, and 2010. The surveys have concluded that over 90% of alumni demonstrate intent to practice on an interdisciplinary team and secondly that over 40% were either practicing in a rural area or intend to practice in a rural area.
South Carolina AHEC would like to thank all of our many partner universities, community liaisons, health professions student preceptors, the Health Professions Student Coordinators, and the SCRIPT students for all of their work and enthusiasm over the years to make SCRIPT the outstanding program that it is. We continue to work to restore this program in the future.
For more information please contact Diane Kennedy at kennedyd@lcahec.com
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