Many rural areas in the US suffer from a shortage of doctors. Unable to attract Americans, they have turned to foreign-born physicians.
The city of Logan in West Virginia has just 1,779 citizens. The nearest large city, Charleston, is an hour away, via winding roads through the Appalachian mountains. Logan is surrounded by rural land, and is in an area which has lost half its population since the 1950s.
It's a far cry from just about anything that would attract an affluent doctor from overseas. And yet they come. Just 232 doctors per 100,000 residents work in the state of West Virginia. One neighbouring state has more than 400.
The US Department of Health designates 51 out of 55 counties in the state as "medically under-served areas". Logan County is among them, and that is precisely why doctors from all parts of the world fill the hallways of Logan Regional Medical Center.
A visa waiver programme was set up in 1994 to address the shortage by offering foreign-born doctors on J-1 student visas an easy path to a permanent residency - if they agree to work in an under-served area for three years.
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