Catching up with 3RNET's Longest Member, New Mexico Health Resources

Celebrating 30 Years of 3RNET with Melissa Candelaria and Jerry Harrison

Continuing our series celebrating 3RNET’s 30th Anniversary, Executive Director Mike Shimmens sat down with Jerry Harrison and Melissa Candelaria from New Mexico Health Resources. They are the longest-serving current members of 3RNET and a wealth of information not only about its history, but about where 3RNET is needed in the future of rural health care. 

Both Jerry Harrison and Melissa Candelaria started at New Mexico Health Resources in 1994. Harrison, hired in July of that year, had a behavioral health background, but no experience in rural health. He hired Candelaria four months later, in November. Dating the official start of 3RNET back to 1995 places Harrison and Candelaria’s start with the organization right at its inception. 

Early Days

“I was young,” Candelaria remembered. “I certainly didn’t come from a medical background. I was basically in business. They were talking about rural recruitment and retention. I was just trying to grasp what all that meant much less, you know, on a national level trying to understand what this was going to mean today.” 

One of her first memories of 3RNET is of an annual conference held in Albuquerque, New Mexico. 3RNET started as a very committed group of volunteers, as we highlighted last month with the early efforts of Fred Moskol, the founding director. “They were a very fun group,” she recalled, “and they really took me under their wing.” 

Aside from personal connections through organizations like the National Rural Health Association, a number of early members had come into rural health care recruitment from being private recruiters, Harrison said. “[They] had worked in professional recruitment and knew one another very well, or they were involved on the public health side of things, but working in states where recruitment was done through private recruitment and a lot of efforts were made to try to do things differently.”

Not only did the members of this new organization want to change the way recruiting was done, but there were new avenues of recruitment opening up to them. Before the Conrad 30 Program was instituted to recruit international medical graduates to rural and underserved areas, there was a similar program through the Department of Agriculture. When that program ended, though, there was a need for new opportunities, especially for recruiting international physicians. 

As the 3RNET grew, so too did its influence. 

Influence Close to Home

Having been involved with 3RNET from the beginning, Candelaria spoke to how the organization has influenced the state of New Mexico. “It’s been a big positive impact on New Mexico,” she said, “because, in our eyes, the majority of the folks that we send out to our people are from 3RNET.”

Before Harrison began at New Mexico Health Resources, the organization had recruited ten people. “Which, among the states, was a lot,” Harrison pointed out. “That was based upon the relationship that [the office director at the time] had developed over the years with individual medical directors, recruiters, whomever, and that she had the self-generated ability to recruit.” 

“The last three or four years,” he said, “not counting the J-1s (Conrad 30 waivers), we’ve averaged about 85 people a year. That’s very meaningful. And that would not have happened without the 3RNET.” 

Evolution of the Organization

One of the biggest changes both Harrison and Candelaria have seen during their involvement with 3RNET is shifts in leadership, especially among individual states. “I used to know everybody pretty personally,” Candelaria shared. 

As a member starting in 2006, and serving as director since 2012, Mike Shimmens has seen this change among members as well. “I don’t think it’s any less passionate once they get involved,” he said, “but the cycle is so much quicker.” 

Speaking of recruiting, Harrison said “This can be a strange business to begin with–taking advantage of employers and individual providers to make a buck can easily happen–and 3RNET is nothing like that. We’re trying to do the right thing. Whether we’re always good at it or not, we’re trying to.”

In New Mexico, as in so many rural and underserved areas across the country, 3RNET has made an impact on the communities it aims to serve. “We talk up the 3RNET wherever we go,” Harrison said. “In fact, we use the 3RNET as an entry point for providers to sign up with us. That’s how committed we are.” 

“I felt like if one state had such an impact,” Shimmens said, “think of what the impact was in the entire country over 30 years. I appreciate all the passion that both of you have given to this organization too, and just your ideas and commitment over the years, because 3RNET would not be here without the people that started it.” 

Melissa and Jerry are great examples of the grassroots effort that takes place nationwide to support the work of 3RNET, as well as the camaraderie amongst states that has kept the organization growing for the past 30 years. As is often said in rural and underserved recruitment within 3RNET: a win for rural is a win for rural. New Mexico Health Resources represents many wins not only for their state, but for the entire nation.