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WICHITA — It’s not always easy for medical school students to find career advice outside the classroom.

“Students don’t have much opportunity to talk to doctors,” said Tessa Rohrberg, a third-year medical student from Sharon Springs who attends the University of Kansas School of Medicine in Wichita. “It’s hard for students themselves to take the initiative.”

A program, now entering its second year, aims to change that.

The Kansas Health Foundation this week awarded a Recognition Grant of $12,390 to the Kansas Academy of Family Physicians Foundation for its “Faces in Family Medicine” program.

The program links medical students with practicing physicians in the student’s interest areas.

Workforce experts predict a shortage of tens of thousands of primary care physicians in the coming years. Medical schools, physician groups and others are looking for ways to encourage medical students to continue in a primary care field, such as internal medicine, pediatrics or family medicine, in order to have enough physicians.

Among the reasons students cite for not choosing primary care are education debt that can easily surpass $150,000 and concern about balancing family life with a busy medical practice.

“We’re trying to get students in the pipeline,” said Dr. Jen Brull, a Plainville physician who is a co-coordinator of the program and a mentor to three students. “Until students are exposed to family medicine they may not have any idea it’s what they want to do with their life. If you can show students in their first or second year of medical school how cool it is, it’s going to be on their radar, at least.”

The program’s directors recruited physicians in all areas of family medicine, including physicians who specialize in taking care of patients with allergies or those with occupational injuries. Physicians were also recruited from urban and rural areas, from practices that take place only in hospitals to small rural practices that cover all procedures.

“A lot of students, and, I think, the general population, tends to think that family medicine is for rural primary care doctors – and for a great percentage of doctors, that’s what they do,” Rohrberg said. “But in family medicine you can also do sports medicine, emergency medicine, and be addiction specialists. There are so many more things you can go into.”

“I think many medical students get an idea that family medicine means a certain kind of prac-tice,” said Carolyn Gaughan, executive director of the Kansas Academy of Family Physicians, which facilitates the program. “They don’t realize how much variety there is. Our intent was to expose students to actual people who are doing these kinds of things.”

About 50 students were paired last year with about 30 physicians, Gaughan said. The students and mentors communicate via e-mail, phone message and in-person encounters, including visits to the physicians’ offices and even social events such as college football games.

“For me, it has been nice to talk to the doctor via e-mail or a phone call and just ask some questions about what they went through in med school,” Rohrberg said. “I wanted to know how they studied for tests. I just took my first round of boards, and asked him how he studied for it and prepared for it. I’m also interested in having a family, so I talked to him about his family life and what that was like.”

The group made an intentional effort to combine social media into its mentorship program, Gaughan said, even holding a training session for the physicians who were interested but uninitiated into the world of Facebook and text messaging.

Brull said she had worked with students for years in a family medicine summer program that sent students to her clinic in Plainville.

They’d have a positive experience during the summer, she said, but then she wouldn’t hear from the students again and had no idea where they eventually ended up.

In the last few years, she said, those same students started connecting with her on Facebook or would send a quick text message to keep in touch.

“If you match your communication style with the generation you’re mentoring, you get a lot more out of that relationship,” she said. “It didn’t work for everyone. Some mentors said they weren’t interested in getting on Facebook. But some students said it would be creepy to be friends with the doctors on Facebook. We tried to match those students with those doctors, and it worked pretty nicely.”

The program’s second year will begin this fall. It will be advertised to all students in the KU School of Medicine’s Family Medicine Interest Group, which is mostly first and second year students, Gaughan said.