OPMers:
I came across an article on Wing of Zock, the blog for Academic Medicine, regarding new medical schools in the pipeline or proposed to open. This summarizes very well what’s in the works. I thought you’d find it interesting.
Cheers,
Liza
Hmm… Interesting. Trying to respond to the physician shortage by opening new schools or adding spots to incoming classes, and yet the government still isn’t opening more residency slots:
http://www.kansas.com/2013/04/05/2748756/mo re-medi…
It’s going to be very important to keep an eye on any upcoming legislation and make sure we speak up to our representatives. If this doesn’t get addressed soon, there will be a massively clogged funnel at the end of 4th year, because there just won’t be enough funding to continue training for everyone. Something has to give there…it just doesn’t make any sense.
Thank you for the article. I was intrigued by some of the points presented by the author, namely, how do you address a shortage of primary care physicians when you have to recruit those same physicians to train the next batch of doctors. Also, it got me thinking if there is any correlation between setting up a school in a rural area and the number of students that stay in that rural area to practice medicine? This would show that setting up medical schools in underserved rural areas does work.
I think it’s good that the author ends the article by asking if more schools is really “needed or desirable”. There are solutions in place that may help to address the shortage of primare care physicians, namely the 173 programs for Physician Assistants without the need for more medical schools. Nurse Practitioners are another avenue for providing excellent primary care.
This article got me thinking, how many physicians do we need in the USA? How many do other countries have? A quick google search got me to this link (http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_phy_per_100 0_peo-physicians-per-1-00 0-people) which states that we here in the USA have 2.3 physicians per 1,000 people which is in align with countries like the UK with 2.2 per 1,000 people and Canada with 2.1 per 1,000 people. Of course this is nowhere near Cuba with 5.91 per 1,000 or Israel with 3.82 per 1,000 people. So how many doctors is enough? Are we overblowing this issue? I’m not sure.
I went to DC to lobby on this very issue, Congress is very aware of it. I don’t know that in the current environment if anything will be done to address it, considering that residency spots are paid for through medicare funding and the plan du-jour of the majority of congress is to slash medicare into non existence.
The fact that there aren’t also new residency slots opening up proves to me that the motivation behind opening new schools isn’t to improve access to healthcare, it’s greed.
Wow!! Congratulations…
- pathdr2b Said:
The fact that there aren't also new residency slots opening up proves to me that the motivation behind opening new schools isn't to improve access to healthcare, it's greed.
IMHO, I think you hit the nail right on the head with that one. This is exactly the same thing (minus the residency slots of course) that happened when there was a supposed "nursing shortage" a couple of years back.
Every educational institution (including the on-line ones) opened the flood gates of their marketing campaign to target those that were desperate for a better life and a decent education.
The result...many students couldn't handle the pressure, long study hours, and personal sacrifices to complete the program so they failed, dropped, or other. However, the schools got their money and the students were left with debt.
To the few that did pass no one explained to them that the nursing shortage was for qualified experienced nurses and very few hospital corporations were willing nor wanting to take on the financial liability of hiring and training a new grad.
I see this situation with more schools opening up without the increase of residency slots to be on par with what happened with the nurse education "bubble"
Many students are left with a horrendous amount of debt and no professional position to sustain themselves with.
Greed is everywhere, even in "altruistic" ivory tower academia.