Rural Rx: North Carolina's first new medical school in 40 years is training doctors who may serve smaller communities.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: NC TREND: Campbell's troop

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With its modern facade of gleaming glass and brick, Southeastern Regional Medical Center covers several blocks in a Lumberton neighborhood of retail centers and bank branches. Its impressive presence masks an unsettling reality: Robeson, its home county, has a fraction as many doctors, per capita, as the state's largest counties.

Now, three years after Campbell University in Buies Creek launched North Carolina's first new medical school in more than four decades, 40 students are at Southeastern. Their presence offers hope in a state where underserved communities beg for doctors, while some urban centers have four times the state average of about 27 per 10,000 residents. Robeson County, with the fourth-lowest median income among North Carolina's 100 counties, has about 13 docs per 10,000. Neighboring Hoke County's ratio is less than three.

Under a partnership with Southeastern, which has an active medical staff of 117 doctors, Campbell students are spending two years in Lumberton in clinical rotation. After graduation--for the first class, that's May 2017--most will spend another three or more years there as residents. Then, they'll face a big choice: stay local or head for the big cities?

Southeastern is one of a half-dozen N.C. hospitals collaborating with Campbell's Jerry Wallace School of Osteopathic Medicine, hoping to boost the rural doctor count. "All of the data indicate between 65% and 70% of physicians in America practice within a 50-mile radius of where they did their residency," says Britt Davis, vice president for institutional advancement. "If you travel in a 50-mile radius of those hospitals, you'll see every need known to man."

Campbell might demonstrate one way North Carolina can ease its uneven distribution of doctors. The ninth-largest state by population, North Carolina is 34th in primary-care doctors. The medical school opened in 2013 and has become the core of the university's blossoming health-sciences campus, which former President Jerry Wallace championed during his tenure from 2003-15. Campbell's pharmacy school dates to 1986, but in the last five years, the university added a physician assistant school, a master's degree program in public health, a physical-therapy doctoral program and a school of nursing. With 150 slots, the medical school received 3,300 applications the first year, before it opened. For those slots this fall, it has more than...