Arizona
New primary care physicians contribute to healthier Arizona
In 2019, the University of Arizona Health Sciences launched the Primary Care Physician Scholarship program to alleviate an alarming shortage of primary care physicians in Arizona. Last fall, the first scholarship recipients entered the workforce as physicians, fulfilling the program’s promise of expanding access to health care in the state.
Primary Care Physician Scholarship recipient Megan Kelly, MD, is now a doctor at Neighborhood Outreach Access to Health Desert Mission Health Center, a Federally Qualified Health Center in Phoenix.
An estimated 600 primary care providers were needed to address the state’s shortage when the state legislature approved $8 million in annual funding to support scholarships for medical students. In exchange for free tuition, scholarship recipients committed to practice primary care or another designated critical-access specialty in a rural or urban underserved Arizona community.
By January of 2020, 29 students from the UArizona College of Medicine – Tucson and the UArizona College of Medicine – Phoenix comprised the first group of Primary Care Physician Scholarship recipients. Three students – Dawn Bowling, MD, Megan Kelly, MD, and George Nguyen, MD – accepted the scholarship during their final year of medical school. They all graduated, completed their residencies last summer, and accepted positions as primary care physicians in Arizona.
Watch a video of Dawn Bowling and her journey to becoming a primary care physician.
A bridge to better care
For Nguyen, the path to becoming a physician had a bridge, but not one Nguyen had to cross. Rather, it was a bridge he provided as a teenager to help his family navigate the health care system.
Primary Care Physician Scholarship recipient George Nguyen, MD, is now a doctor of internal medicine and a clinical assistant professor at the College of Medicine – Phoenix.
Nguyen grew up in Peoria, Arizona, a once-rural city that is now part of the vast Phoenix metropolitan area. His Vietnamese parents did not speak English well, which resulted in challenging conversations when Nguyen’s grandmother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and dementia.
“My parents had lived in American for some time and were the main caretaker for my grandma, but they had never needed to be involved in my grandmother’s health care like this situation called for,” said Nguyen, who was in high school at the time. “And not speaking English well was another layer on top of the barriers they began to face.”
Nguyen felt inspired to become a leader within his family and took the initiative to facilitate their health care needs. His proficiency with the English language helped overcome many of the major hurdles the family faced, and that sense of service led him to broader ambitions to become a doctor.
“What I’ve realized is that my family situation is very similar to other patients and their family situations,” Nguyen said. “There are a lot of barriers that patients are not able to get through to access health care. I wanted to be a bigger part of that, and I felt like being a primary care physician was one way I could achieve that.”
Nguyen shares a special moment with his grandmother at his wedding in 2022. He says the act of helping facilitate health care for his grandmother fueled his amibition to become a doctor.
Nguyen studied physiology as an undergraduate at the University of Arizona before graduating from the College of Medicine – Phoenix and completing a residency at Banner – University Medical Center Phoenix. He recently became an assistant clinical professor of internal medicine at the College of Medicine – Phoenix in addition to his work at Banner Health Center in Arcadia.
A pivot to a new passion
Like Nguyen, Kelly was born and raised in the Phoenix area. Her grandmother is a nurse, which fostered her early interest in taking care of people. This led her to Tucson to pursue an undergraduate degree at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health. She planned to get a master’s degree in public health, too, but as she progressed through her undergraduate studies, she became more interested in patient care and pivoted to medical school.
Megan Kelly, MD, was joined by her husband, Austin, and their son, Emmett, at her residency graduation held at the Arizona Biltmore Resort in June 2023.
“I realized that many of my interests in public health could have more impact in the clinical setting,” Kelly explained. “Addressing inequities in our health care system and understanding different types of patient populations is what family medicine is so passionate and focused on. So it was a pretty easy decision from there to go into family medicine.”
Kelly completed medical school at the College of Medicine – Phoenix and a residency at Banner – University Medical Center Phoenix. She was hired at the Neighborhood Outreach Access to Health Desert Mission Health Center, a Federally Qualified Health Center in Phoenix.
Kelly believes her background in public health gives her a unique perspective in understanding her patients.
“It makes me more compassionate,” Kelly said. “For me, it’s not just treating a disease and giving them a treatment plan. I understand that I need to look at the whole person and consider that they have a life outside of the four walls of the clinic, where stressors and other factors either contribute to their condition or perhaps make it difficult to pursue certain treatment path. Those are all things a primary care physician needs to take into account.”
Kelly is excited for others to follow in the path made possible by the Primary Care Physician Scholarship program.
“The more primary care physicians we have, the healthier our population can be,” Kelly said. “More physicians give more people access to the health care system. And the more access people have to their primary care physician, the easier it becomes to catch infections and diseases early. This provides better paths to treatments for patients and results in healthier populations in general.”
The University of Arizona and Tucson are known for yearlong warm weather, but when is it too much? With temperature reaching record highs in March, the city of Tucson has already reported increased temperatures for this year.
In the wake of the third annual Southern Arizona Heat Summit, integrating voices throughout the City of Tucson, community stakeholders and experts from UA gather to speak about possible solutions and policies to address rising temperatures and extreme heat.
The summit strives to ensure that the lived experiences of Southern Arizona residents are voiced. The first summit commenced in 2024, in response to the declaration of an extreme heat emergency in Arizona by Gov. Katie Hobbs, as part of a larger plan called Arizona’s Extreme Heat Response Plan.
With representation from organizations such as the American Red Cross, the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, Arizona Jobs with Justice, Tucson Indian Center and many more, the summit emphasized the importance of the perspective and concerns of stakeholder groups throughout the community.
The summit included a variety of UA experts, including faculty representing the School of Geography, Development and Environment; the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy; the Mel & Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health and the College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture.
One particular project, led by Ladd Keith at the School of Landscape Architecture and Planning, is a part of the Southwest Urban Corridor Integrated Field Laboratory, which is funded by the United States’ Department of Energy to explore extreme heat throughout Arizona. SW-IFL works in collaboration with other national laboratories including those at ASU and NAU.
The team works to analyze extreme heat in the southwest and rural areas, and how communities deal with heat by conducting interviews. The team has also prescribed policy to Pima County and the City of Tucson regarding more effective strategies to combat rising temperatures, such as green stormwater infrastructure.
Anne-Lise Boyer, a post-doctoral researcher with the Climate Assessment for the Southwest, shared that the team particularly analyzed extreme heat in three parts: heat mitigation, heat management and heat governance.
Mitigation deals with prevention through strategies such as green infrastructure and planting trees, while management includes cooling sensors and heat warning systems. Governance allows these measures to be enacted through policy.
In Tucson, some of the most meaningful work the team has engaged in has been drafting the City of Tucson’s Heat Action Roadmap in 2024, which outlines goals to mitigate and mandate extreme heat and its impacts while prioritizing community voices.
The goals of the roadmap include informing and educating citizens of Tucson on the adverse effects of extreme heat and cooling people’s homes and neighborhoods by incorporating heat risk in regional planning. These steps are essential to practicing heat management, especially as the city of Tucson grows.
“I think the most interesting thing about being based in Tucson is that because the heat has been here for a long time, it’s like a laboratory in itself,” Boyer said. “We have all this research and all this collaboration happening with local actors because it’s a pressing issue in Arizona.”
As the annual heat summit recurs, new ideas and perspectives continue to be shared throughout the community. Boyer shared that this year, the Southern Arizona Heat Summit focused on the youth perspective, highlighting middle school and high school students and how heat impacts their everyday lives. Many students spoke about how heat shaped their lives at home, school and sports.
“That’s one of the goals, to have community members participate and give their input in how they wish the city will deal with the heat,” Boyer said.
Boyer and Kirsten Lake, a program coordinator for the SW-IFL team, also shared how the impacts of extreme heat impact some neighborhoods and communities in Tucson more than others, and that their research often evaluates these factors to determine where heat management efforts would make the greatest impact.
“Its important when you’re putting into effect some of these measures, that you make sure you put it where it’s going to make the biggest difference,” Lake said.
The work of the SW-IFL team is not just locally known. The Brookhaven National Lab based in New York deployed a specialized truck to Tucson to collect information on the atmosphere and rising temperatures. The SW-IFL team hosted the Brookhaven team.
Additionally, Keith’s work has led to a guidebook called “Planning for Urban Heat Resilience” which focuses on the adverse effects extreme heat poses to marginalized communities across the country.
“It is so different from place to place and neighborhood to neighborhood because you have to take the whole context into account,” Boyer said. “They recommend first to document the heat impacts in your communities.”
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PAGE, AZ (AZFamily) — A person accused of making terroristic threats toward a northern Arizona medical facility was arrested Friday morning.
Just after 10:30 p.m., police received a report of a person calling the facility and threatening to kill staff and Native Americans, according to the Page Police Department.
Authorities said staff placed the facility on lockdown until officers identified the suspect and arrested them outside their home.
The suspect was booked on charges of disorderly conduct, threatening and intimidating, and making terroristic threats. Police have not publicly identified the person.
“The Page Police Department is grateful for and supports the medical staff’s decision to put the medical facility into lockdown until the suspect was arrested and the situation was rendered safe,” the department said in a Facebook post.
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In these four-round projections, the Arizona Cardinals don’t get a tackle until the fourth round.
We are just days away from the 2026 NFL draft, and that means some final mock drafts. What direction will the draft take the Arizona Cardinals?
Draft Wire’s Curt Popejoy put together a four-round mock draft for the Cardinals. They go defense early but rebuild the offense for 2026 and moving forward, including landing their potential franchise quarterback.
Cardinals 4-round mock draft
Here are the players in the first four rounds Popejoy projects for Arizona.
- Round 1: Ohio State EDGE/LB Arvell Reese
- Round 2: Alabama QB Ty Simpson
- Round 3: Clemson WR Antonio Williams
- Round 4: Florida OT Austin Barber
What we think of the picks
The Cardinals want to trade out of the third pick and draft a tackle, so not getting a tackle until Round 4 seems unlikely, although they did meet with Barber. They do have options at right tackle for 2026 already on the roster.
Reese would be a great pick if they don’t trade back, as they badly need pass-rushing help off the edge.
Drafting Simpson seems inevitable at this point, so it has to be in a mock draft, although the feeling is they will need to go up into Round 1 again to get him.
Williams has speed and is almost six feet tall, but he does have short arms.
Get more Cardinals and NFL coverage from Cards Wire’s Jess Root and others by listening to the latest on the Rise Up, See Red podcast. Subscribe on Spotify, YouTube or Apple podcasts.
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