Clinical campus alumni are the first to return to Springfield for work

Returning to Springfield after their residency was an easy decision for Dr. Rachel Plate and Dr. Nicholas Timmerwilke.

Plate and Timmerwilke both attended their third and fourth years of medical school at the University of Missouri's Springfield Clinical Campus, and they will be starting in Mercy Hospital Springfield and Mercy Hospital Lebanon's emergency departments on Aug. 1.

They are the first alumni of the program to return to Springfield. Another alumnus, in the class before Plate and Timmerwilke, is currently practicing medicine in Bolivar.

Dr. David Haustein, associate dean for SCC, hopes more former students will follow Plate and Timmerwilke's leads as they complete their residencies. After their second year of medical school at MU, students are offered the chance to complete their education in Springfield before moving onto their residency.

"We’re hopeful that every summer we’re going to have more and more … folks coming back to the area,” Haustein said.

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Since it began in 2016, SCC has seen five classes graduate. Plate and Timmerwilke were part of the second class. Other students are still going through their residency, which can take anywhere from three to seven years, according to Haustein.

Plate is a Kansas City native, but has family in Taney County and a husband from the Springfield area. Her residency in Charlotte, North Carolina, made her realize that she wanted to be closer to home.

While family played a large role in bringing her back to Springfield, so did her experience at the clinical campus.

"It was a lot about family, but I think the clinical campus definitely made me, as someone not from the area, very comfortable coming back here and knowing there were going to be great opportunities for fulfilling employment," Plate said.

Haustein feels that the connections students are able to make in medical school benefit the hospitals, as well.

"The fact that we opened this campus and now we’re giving students connections at both of the health systems, I think it really increases the chances of Cox and Mercy and other local health systems to be able to recruit docs who already have a vested interest in the region and want to be here long term," Haustein said. "A lot of our students grew up here, went to high school or college here and I feel like they already have a connection to the area."

Timmerwilke is one of those homegrown students. He grew up in Buffalo, got his undergraduate degree in Arkansas and went to University of Missouri for medical school.

"I’d basically lived in a 200-mile radius of Springfield my entire life,” Timmerwilke said.

Soon after he started his residency in Las Vegas, he knew that he wanted to return to the Springfield area.

"Pretty quickly, when I got (to Las Vegas), I realized it wasn’t my place. It wasn’t home. It didn’t have my people, my friends, my family," Timmerwilke said. "The culture is different, the food’s different, the weather is different."

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Timmerwilke was so determined to come back to Springfield that when it came time to job search, he "didn’t even reach out to anywhere else." His experience at SCC, in addition to his roots in the area, were deciding factors.

"I kind of knew that I wanted to come back to Springfield, and I knew that specifically because of the third and fourth year of med school at the Springfield Clinical Campus," Timmerwilke said. "I got to work at Mercy and at Cox in the emergency room, so I knew what patient populations they take care of, what resources they have. They’re both massive level one trauma centers, so I’ve got pretty much every resource you could want."

Part of what allowed students to foster a connection with the community is the unique nature of the Springfield Clinical Campus, according to Dr. David Barbe, regional vice president of Mercy Springfield.

"They get more real-world patient time than students do in university settings, generally speaking, and I think — my own opinion — is that creates better physicians, more prepared to meet the challenges of the modern day practices of medicine, and that’s good for everybody," Barbe said. "So when they come back here, join a practice, they’re ready to hit the ground running; they understand what medical practice is like in Springfield and they’re ready to go."

Susan Szuch is the health and public policy reporter for the Springfield News-Leader. Follow her on Twitter @szuchsm. Story idea? Email her at sszuch@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: University of Missouri med students start their careers in Springfield