For Nickerson native Jessica Pries, M.D., it was time to come back to Kansas. To be 45 minutes from family instead of five hours away. To a place — Great Bend — where she could live the “country life” and spend time with her surgical patients instead of shuttling between multiple hospitals and offices.

With her undergraduate years at Kansas State University and the University of Kansas, medical school in Kansas City and then Wichita, five years of residency in New Orleans followed by a bariatric surgery fellowship in Missouri and — finally! — several years practicing in northwest Arkansas, “I haven’t been home basically since I was 18,” Pries says.

Pries joined the University of Kansas Health System’s Great Bend Campus in September, filling a critical need, as she’s the sole general surgeon. “I really wanted to go back to a place where I could get to know the people I was taking care of and get to know the community,” says Pries, a KU School of Medicine-Wichita graduate who went through the Scholars in Rural Health program (now Scholars in Health).

Growing up in Kansas and finding her path

Growing up in Nickerson, northwest of Hutchinson, Pries had horses, did rodeo and participated in 4-H. Nickerson is still home for her mother, a physician assistant in Hutchinson, and her father, a retired drywall contractor, and her younger brother lives in Wichita.

A “bit of a science nerd” and “too smart for my own good” in high school, Pries started college at K-State, where she’d earned early admission to the veterinary school but concluded she was more interested in caring for people than animals, no matter how much she loved them.

“I wanted to do a little bit more patient care than veterinary care could offer, and I’ve never been bitten by a human being,” she says. “I had heard about the rural scholars program and transferred to KU kind of at the same time.”

Rural program solidified, affirmed her choice

The Scholars in Health program, begun in 1997, identifies undergraduates interested in medical practice in rural areas — and now urban areas as well — and guarantees them admission to medical school if they meet grade and other requirements.

Mentoring and shadowing rural doctors are key elements, and Pries shadowed a doctor in Sterling, not far from her hometown. For Pries, the support of the staff and program, along with working as a medical assistant during college, “helped to affirm my interest in medicine” and  “really set me down the path” to where she is today.

“It’s really beneficial to go through the program as an undergrad, because from day one medical school is like drinking from a fire hydrant,” she says.

She particularly gives a “big shout out” to K. James Kallail, Ph.D., the former associate dean for research at KUSM-Wichita and co-creator of the program who retired in 2023. “He was a mentor through the whole process and brought us together and helped me start my journey. He cared about Kansas, and you could really feel his passion and his support.”

Medical school revealed her specialty

In Wichita and the second half of medical school, Pries found a hands-on, immersive educational experience that’s “really kind of like a mini residency” and discovered her specialty of surgery.

“To make it in surgery long term, you really have to love it. It’s not a job. It’s a lifestyle,” says Pries.  “I never loved anything as much as I loved my surgery rotation.”

Longtime faculty member Marilee McBoyle-Wiesner, M.D., who retired in April, made an impression. “She was a real gem, somebody who volunteered her time to teach us outside of the regular rotation. We took call with the residents and would be there overnight for 24-hour shifts. We took mock oral boards, just like residents do.”

For her residency, Pries wanted to go outside Kansas because “there’s a lot of different ways of doing procedures, and you get exposed to different things at different institutions.” She found that experience at Ochsner Medical Center in New Orleans, where “we got to not just see but participate in and learn and train on very advanced techniques, advanced surgeries that are harder to come by.”

Her next stop was a year-long bariatric surgery fellowship at the University of Missouri in Columbia. She was attracted by “the technicality of those procedures” and minimally invasive surgery in general using laparoscopic and robotic methods. “We can do things that are pretty incredible, and the patients are out of the hospital the next day living a normal life.”

“It’s a powerful thing to be able to go in surgically with your own two hands and fix a problem that left untreated could kill a person,” she says.

Taking a practice to Great Bend

Now, Pries feels fortunate to use her skills and gifts in her home state, where her practice will be strictly general surgery.

“Coming back to Kansas definitely revolved around being closer to my family. My family is all here, and it’s pretty rough being only five hours away but only seeing my parents two times a year,” says Pries, who in 2024 married Jason Kuilan, who grew up in rural Louisiana.

“Everybody in Great Bend has been so welcoming,” she says. “It’s really been a reinforcement that this move was the right thing for me and for my husband,” who recently was named the city’s economic development director.

For the surgeon, it’s been a full circle, a journey that’s a confirmation of the rural missions of the medical school and Scholars in Health: “I know I went away for a while, but I’m very happy to be back.”