Even though Lauren March’s path to becoming a physician associate (PA) wasn’t linear, she knew as early as high school that health care was the direction she wanted to pursue.
Growing up in La Grande, Lauren was inspired in middle school by her participation in Northeast Oregon Area Health Education Center’s (AHEC) Girls in Science program, now known as Investigators of Science, which gives students the chance to get hands-on experience with science, technology, math and computer science.
She initially wanted to go to medical school and become a doctor, but began exploring other options in college, including public health, before ultimately deciding on a degree in exercise science.
Lauren finished her degree in 2019 and wasn’t sure she was going to use it until shortly after graduation, when she was involved in a car accident that resulted in a lot of doctor's appointments and shifted her perspective.
“In that time, I met a PA that was a part of my care team, and I was like, 'Oh, this is really a neat role,’” Lauren said, adding that she realized she still loved medicine and was inspired to help others the way she was helped.
She ended up finding a job as a medical assistant in a reproductive endocrinology clinic in Seattle and was inspired by another PA she met there. She had a similar experience with a PA she met in her next job as a medical assistant at a rural family medicine clinic on Orcas Island in the San Juan Islands.
“I just felt like as I moved through that world in medicine, I kept meeting PAs and feeling really connected to them,” Lauren said. “They could have a really big impact in the patient's life. They had really great priorities as far as where their care came from, because I felt like they could kind of combine some of the nursing model and the medical model to create a really great opportunity to connect with patients.”
Lauren enrolled in the PA program at Oregon Health & Science University and engaged with AHEC again through the AHEC Scholars Program, a two-year certificate program that prepares students for future practice in rural and underserved communities.
“I've spent three months this year in Portland,” she said. “The rest have been all away rotations — the majority of them in very rural areas, including Alaska, and I don't think that would have been possible without AHEC.”
Having grown up in Eastern Oregon and developing a passion for rural life and health care, Lauren said it hasn’t always been easy to find people who share those values, and that “it is sometimes a little discouraging when I'm constantly saying 'I want to go rural,' and everyone is like, 'why?'
“Having that kind of corner of AHEC where I got to see people and go to lectures and go on the didactics and learn from people who were also passionate about rural health care was very inspiring to me, and I really appreciated that, and it helped kind of fuel me a little bit through the program,” she said.
Lauren is graduating this summer and returning to Eastern Oregon with her partner to serve as a PA at Winding Waters Medical Clinic in Enterprise — a return that her family and friends would not have anticipated when she left for college years ago.
“When I left Eastern Oregon, I could not wait to leave,” she said. “My dad thought I was never coming back. Everyone was like, 'she's gone.'
“I just wanted to have a different experience. I wanted to live in a city. I wanted to try something new. And it was amazing, and I loved where I lived, and I've had so many amazing opportunities. But to be able to go back to where you grew up is such a powerful thing.”
Lauren said she loves the region and that the move comes at a time when she and her partner are looking to establish themselves somewhere. Aside from the professional opportunities, she has a community of friends and family there and access to plenty of her favorite recreational activities, including hiking, biking and rafting.
She is looking forward to showing her friends the area.
“The people who live there are so in touch with what it means to be in a rural place and to live remotely, and I think providing health care for those people is just going to be such an honor,” Lauren said. “You know, they're people who work so hard, and they have given so much to the area and to their friends and family there and it's just such an opportunity to be a cornerstone for them in a way that I could not do if I were living in Portland and working in Portland because you just fill a different role being a rural provider.”