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The Mountain Area Health Education Center (MAHEC) is celebrating forty years as a medical training center in Western North Carolina. With a mission to provide quality healthcare as the foundation for training physicians, dentists, pharmacists and health professionals, one of MAHEC’s greatest contributions to WNC are the graduates who stayed in the region to become family doctors, obstetricians and dentists.
“In four decades we have graduated 436 physicians who are leaders in primary, ob/gyn and dental care,” said Dr. Jeffery E. Heck, President and CEO of MAHEC. “Our faculty instill not only a passion for learning and medical excellence, but a love for the mountains and the people who live here. We are particularly proud of our graduates who practice medicine right here in WNC.”
MAHEC was incorporated in 1974 to help meet the need for physicians in rural areas of the State. Graduates from rural residency programs are three times more likely to practice in rural areas than urban residency program graduates. In the 1970s the North Carolina General Assembly mandated the UNC Chapel Hill School of Medicine to increase their student body by fifty percent and 300 new primary care training positions were added in a statewide “campus without walls.” The Mountain Area Health Education Center was established with a family medicine residency program to serve a 16 county region in WNC.
Dr. James McMillan came to Asheville as a resident in those early years. “It was a frontier back then,” he says. “You’ve got to keep in mind that when I started primary care, preventative healthcare was unknown.”
MAHEC was at the forefront of a burgeoning movement toward primary care, and Dr. McMillan says the Asheville community embraced MAHEC, its first wave of residents, and this new approach. “The community support was just overwhelming with how much the physicians and the hospitals and the nurses were just really happy to have us there.”
“Access to high quality healthcare is one of the most significant challenges for rural communities and MAHEC is important to the future of WNC,” says Dr. Geoff Jones, Director of MAHEC’s Hendersonville Family Medicine Residency program, “Rural health training programs will play a key role in supplying the rural workforce of the future.”