Put your healthcare passion to work serving rural and disadvantaged communities in New Mexico. Apply for the two-year Area Health Education Center (AHEC) Scholars’ Program—a federally funded, nationwide initiative to address shortages in health professionals.
Shortages are overwhelmingly found in rural and underserved communities. New Mexicans need providers to close the gaps in emergency medical care, nursing, pharmacy, lab technician services and more.
As an AHEC Scholar, you will be a leader in your field. You will gain the knowledge, skills and training to improve primary care practice outcomes through interprofessional and collaborative training.
To learn more about the program, please email our team at NMAHECScholars@salud.unm.edu.
In New Mexico, the AHEC Scholars Program will enroll at least 45 health professions students from several colleges and universities.
The program focuses on six core topic areas:
Admission is open to college students currently enrolled in a health profession degree program with a duration of two years or longer. Cohorts run for 20 months, beginning each January and continuing through August of the next year.
Interested in becoming an AHEC Scholar? Please fill out an application and an eligibility verification form. Applicants must also submit a 500-word personal statement that addresses the following:
Upon completion of your program, you will receive:
To finish the program, you will need to complete 40 hours per year of didactic training and 40 hours per year of community-based experiential (i.e., clinical) training. The two-year program total is 80 didactic and 80 clinical hours. The first three cohorts of the NM AHEC Scholars Program will be abbreviated to 19 months each, starting in late January and ending in August of the following year. Because of the reduced amount of time, scholars in these two cohorts will only be required to complete 70 hours of didactic instruction over the course of their time in the program.
A significant part of the didactic training will include intensive systems leadership workshops with your scholar cohort. The leadership and skill development program will include required training in Albuquerque with required quarterly follow-up video conferencing. In their second year in the program, scholars will mentor students entering the next cohort.
Community-based clinical experiences will be part of the students' regular health profession programs curriculum. Qualifying clinical experiences will take place in an interprofessional primary care setting in a rural and or underserved area.
You will participate in a series of Interprofessional Primary Care AHEC TeleECHO (IPPC AHEC TeleECHO) clinics. This first clinic of its kind, TeleECHO will introduce you to interprofessional, problem-based clinical didactics that focus on the core topic areas as a part of common primary care case studies.
These case studies will be drawn from the experience of AHEC Scholars, other health professions students and clinic faculty.
In addition to clinic and didactic learning, you will:
We are proud to partner with the following institutions to help make this program achievable.
