Purpose
UC Davis School of Medicine’s five Community Health Scholars (CHS) pathway programs seek to address physician shortages, especially in primary care, in California’s rural, Central Valley, urban, and tribal communities. The maldistribution and shortage of physicians has resulted in significant health disparities in large regions of California. CHS programs are undergraduate medical education (UME) pathway programs that successfully matriculate diverse mission-driven students: 78% identify as underrepresented in medicine by race and ethnicity and 54% as first-generation college graduates.

Methods
CHS students receive a longitudinal health equity curriculum with training on leadership skills and community engagement, engage with a community of like-minded peers and diverse faculty, and complete immersive clinical training within the communities they plan to serve. We retrospectively reviewed Match specialty and location for CHS graduates since the first graduate class in 2011, defining primary care as Family Medicine, Internal Medicine, and Pediatrics. Using medical board data in 2021, we assessed practice locations for CHS graduates who completed graduate medical training.

Results
Between 2011 and 2024, CHS programs graduated 286 physicians, 186 (65%) of whom matched into a primary care specialty: 94 (33%) Family Medicine, 66 (23%) Internal Medicine, and 26 (9%) Pediatrics. 239 (84%) matched to a CA residency program.

Conclusions
UCDSOM’s mission-focused UME pathway programs successfully recruit and graduate a diverse cohort of physicians, 65% of whom match to primary care fields. As the primary care physician shortage grows, UME pathway programs are effective tools for bolstering the primary care workforce. Medical schools can develop similar mission-based UME pathway programs to recruit and train a diverse cohort of primary care physicians and address the workforce needs of underserved communities in California.