When the local UNC School of Medicine campus started in 2016, the program had three third-year medical students who called Wilmington home.

In March, the local class coming in will number 30 third-year medical students and 18-20 in their fourth year, the largest ever of both for the Wilmington program.

“This is quite a sizable increase in the size and scope of our Wilmington campus, but it also marks a high-water mark for us,” said Joseph Pino, a Wilmington-based doctor who is senior vice president of medical education for Novant Health.

The Wilmington physical campus equates to Novant Health New Hanover Regional Medical Center and other local Novant facilities. 

Pino said of those three medical students who first took advantage of the Wilmington campus, one is practicing psychiatry in New Hanover County and another is practicing orthopedics with EmergeOrtho.

“We have an increasing number of students returning after their training to come practice here,” Pino said. 

Carrie Fales, the campus adviser for UNC School of Medicine Wilmington and an emergency physician mainly at Novant Health NHRMC, recently recruited an emergency room physician who was in the fourth cohort of local doctors-in-training – Matthew Yeager. He said his Wilmington experience made him want to come back to practice in the Port City.

“Coming to Wilmington for my clinical rotations was the best part of my time in medical school. I came down for an open house for the Wilmington campus and immediately felt at home. I was met with a leadership team that already knew my name before I had ever met them and truly cared to see me succeed,” Yeager said in an email. “It was a welcome that I longed for from the first day of medical school in Chapel Hill where I often seemed to be just another student in a large medical school class.”

Some examples of the local campus training, he said, were "leadership education, organizing ultrasound electives, creating rural surgery experiences and making homemade simulation models of bloody airways with hot sauce packets.”

Fales said the medical school students in Wilmington “get a lot of one-on-one time with attendings in all the specialties. We have residents that they work with some, but they really get to know the attendings and get to do hands-on procedures and get hands-on involvement more so than some of the other areas that are a little bit more academic.”

Wilmington campus officials have put time and resources into simulation, said Meredith Hughes, director of student affairs for the Wilmington campus.

“We're embracing not only this generation's need for that type of learning but also as we get into AI and other things in health care, we are embracing that as well and providing that education,” she said.

The students are also exposed to different settings.

“They get an academic medical center component. They get a community hospital. They're rotating with us in the emergency department. We staff Pender (Novant Health Pender Medical Center); we staff Scotts Hill, the ortho hospital and the main hospital,” Fales said. “They can have an opportunity to go to any of those places.”

In addition to Wilmington, the Chapel Hill-based UNC School of Medicine has other campuses and sites in Asheville, Charlotte, Greensboro and Raleigh.

“The mission of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine is really to improve the health of North Carolinians. And the way they can do that is through what they call the mountain-to-the-coast education initiative, so we are part of that,” Hughes said. “The theory behind that is, if you recruit from there, or if you train there, that they want to come back and practice there.”