Authors’ Response to “Sustaining Primary Care Pathways: A Vital Strategy for Meeting Urban and Rural Workforce Needs”

We appreciate the response to our article "Where Are They Now? Alumni Outcomes From a Medical School Primary Care Pathway Program." 1,2We agree that attracting and retaining medical students in primary care (PC), family medicine, and their future careers is a multifactorial process combining educational, scholarship, advocacy, and systems level changes.It begins in the recruitment process, nurtured during medical school, and maintained in residency to continue to support future PC physicians and sustain them in practice.It is our hope that other medical schools can replicate and adapt PC models like ours 3 as part of a broader effort to support PC.As mentioned in the initial letter, building effective PC/family medicine pathway training models is more than providing medical students clinical opportunities with PC physician role models.To attract and retain students in PC, training programs must help learners envision a sustainable future PC career.Pathway programs must give students/residents realistic and forwardthinking skills/tools to predict and adapt to where PC is heading while retaining essential PC values.Learners must receive training in interprofessional teams, 4,5 lifestyle medicine approaches to chronic disease prevention and management, 6,7 and PC research.For PC to compete with other specialties and be relevant in academic centers, we need to demonstrate/define what PC research is and highlight its importance. 8Additionally, medical students must have longitudinal PC training beyond their preclinical years 9 to combat the impact of the hidden curriculum as students advance in their training.Continued exposure to PC among postclerkship students in more acute settings (eg, urgent care, labor