After nearly four decades of delivering babies, making hospital rounds, curing colds, and providing hospice care, Dr. Oscar Lovelace is slowly stepping back from his practice in Prosperity to help create a unique residency program that will train a new generation of rural family doctors.
Lovelace — whose motto is “your doctor for life” — is part of a trio of physicians creating a program in Newberry County that will focus on teaching doctors interested in bringing their skills to a medically underserved community. The hope is those residents will develop a lasting love for rural medicine and stick around long after their education is completed.
“The longer I have lived, the more I have come to understand that life is about relationships — with our creator, our friends and, if you have a profession, the privilege of serving others,” said Dr. Lovelace, who is creating the program with fellow doctors Spence Taylor and Jeff Hall. “If you look at physician satisfaction surveys, particularly in primary care, the number one thing that influences satisfaction is a relationship with patients,” Dr. Lovelace said.
South Carolina is projected to need an additional 815 primary care physicians by 2030, but trends have put the traditional family doctor and rural communities like Newberry County at a disadvantage. From 2019 to 2024, there has been a 43% decline nationally in independent physicians and a 5% drop in rural physicians, with a significant shift toward corporate and health-system ownership.
Newberry County has been designated a health professional shortage area by the federal government, and a community health needs assessment last year identified increased access to primary and preventive care as top priorities for the area. “If you look at residency training in South Carolina, they are all sponsored by hospitals,” said Dr. Taylor, a vascular surgeon and former president of Greenville Health System. “There are no programs sponsored completely by independent physicians. Our vision was to create a program —without affiliation to a single health system or university — with the ability to build broad partnerships and remain responsive to the unique needs of a rural community.”
The idea for the residency training program began in a conversation between Richele Taylor, CEO of the South Carolina Medical Association and Dr. Taylor (no relation) about the shortage of physicians in rural communities. Richele Taylor expressed that it was a shame that the SCMA could not simply help create residency programs the way hospitals do as a way to put more physicians directly into the workforce. Dr. Taylor’s response was simple: “Why not?”
He also noted that Dr. Oscar Lovelace had long suggested this kind of approach and had wanted to see a program created in Newberry. From there, both Richele Taylor and Dr. Taylor met with Dr. Lovelace and Newberry Health, and the concept began to take shape.
The program speaks to a broader debate in healthcare workforce policy. Too often, rural access challenges are treated as a reason to rely more heavily on non-physician providers rather than as a call to build a stronger physician pipeline. That was part of what made the Newberry idea so compelling: if South Carolina wants more doctors practicing in rural communities, it has to train doctors in rural communities.
The Newberry County initiative differs from typical medical residency programs because the participants will primarily be based in a rural environment. They will spend their first year at Lexington Medical Center in West Columbia and the following two years in Newberry. That rural setting is an important distinction from city-based hospitals that have tried to create their own residency programs in South Carolina’s hinterlands.
“If you’re at a hospital in, say, Charleston and you’re in a rural track residency, even if you do a bunch of training in a rural area, you still live in Charleston,” Dr. Taylor said. “You go to church in Charleston, you have friends in Charleston, your kids go to school in Charleston. So, when you finish a residency, would you be willing to uproot and move away to that rural community? It just doesn’t happen.” The Newberry County program is different, Dr. Taylor said, because the residents will live where they work.
“Newberry (would be) home base,” Dr. Taylor said. “They’ll set roots here. They’ll either stay in Newberry or in a community like Newberry.”
Creating a rural residency program from the ground up is no small undertaking. It requires accreditation, funding, clinical training sites, hospital and physician partners, faculty leadership, resident recruitment and sustained community support. For that reason, Dr. Lovelace and Dr. Taylor’s willingness to pursue the idea — despite the obstacles — is itself significant. The three-year program will consist of three residents per year, with the first cohort beginning in the summer of 2028. Sanctioned by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, the program will scale to a total of nine residents, with three entering each year. The first graduating class will be in the summer of 2031.
“Beyond training, the program expects to provide expanded health access through clinic operation, with residents and faculty projected to manage thousands of patient panels and establish a sustainable physician pipeline for the region,” according to a presentation outlining the program’s objectives.
The SCMA was integral in helping launch the program, including securing start-up funding from the BlueCross BlueShield Foundation, the state’s Health and Human Services Department and, last year, a $750,000 grant from the federal Health Resources and Services Administration. Once the program is up and running, residents will be part of the SCMA GME Consortium and associated with Newberry Health Hospital, which will receive enhanced Medicare reimbursements to pay the residents and fund the program going forward. SCMA physicians serve on the GME Board to help facilitate the program, with Dr. Taylor shepherding the effort as the Designated Institutional Officer (DIO).
The program has a residency program director lined up. And Dr. Lovelace is establishing a clinic apart from his practice that will be the training site for the residents. “We’re going to be looking for that rare person who says when they enter medical school that they really want to go back to this particular community and become a full-scope family physician,” Dr. Lovelace said. “There’s not that many of those people out there, but they are out there.”
Dr. Lovelace said the program’s leadership will work closely with the deans at medical schools to help find candidates “and let us have a relationship with them early on.”
Rural medicine is a challenge in South Carolina, in part because the population is aging and fewer young people are growing up and establishing roots in small communities. Newberry County has a population of 39,561 people, according to the latest Census Bureau estimate. Nearly a quarter of those people are ages 65 and older — a roughly 50% increase since 2020 — and the median age has climbed to 42.2, up by about 14% over that period. At the same time, the percentage of county residents ages 18 and under is dropping — to 20.7% in 2025 from nearly 25% in 2020. “The large number of baby-boomers, combined with increased life expectancy, has contributed to an aging population nationwide,” according to Newberry County planning documents. “The Newberry County population mirrors this trend to an even greater extent than most of the other counties of the Central Midlands region and statewide.”
Richele Taylor said the program’s founders “know we’re going to have to hustle to recruit folks,” but thinks Newberry County has enough going for it that medical students will see the benefits in choosing a residency there over a larger city. “Newberry is a delightful and vibrant town,” Richele Taylor said. “There’s a college, a great hospital and it’s close to Lake Murray. Hopefully, this program will be unique enough that we can recruit a good class.” The Newberry County program reflects what can happen when the SCMA collaborates on a shared vision with physicians who are willing to imagine a different future for medicine — and the elbow grease required to turn that vision into something real. Rural residency programs are difficult to build, and even with the major pieces in place, success is not guaranteed. But at a time when South Carolina is working to strengthen its physician workforce, the effort shows why SCMA’s role matters: convening the right people, securing the right support, and helping move an idea from possibility to practice. Learn more at scruralresidency.com
