@George-K said in It's gettin' sporty out here...:
@jon-nyc
https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/us-medical-school-enrollment-rises-30
U.S. medical school enrollment has increased by 31% since 2002, according to Results of the 2018 Medical School Enrollment Survey, a new AAMC report. Combined with first-year matriculation at osteopathic schools, medical student enrollment is now 52% higher than in 2002-03.
In response to concerns that a projected doctor shortage could impact patient care, the AAMC in 2006 called on medical schools to increase first-year enrollment by 30%. That target was reached in 2018-19, when first-year matriculation reached 21,622 students. Osteopathic schools increased their enrollment by 164% during this same time period, with 8,124 first-year students enrolled.
But schools ≠ docs
“From a supply side perspective, what we really need to focus on now is the residency slots,” says Atul Grover, MD, PhD, executive vice president of the AAMC. “We’ve done everything we can on the medical school front to reduce the physician shortage, and I think the numbers bear that out. The federal government needs to resume covering its fair share of the costs. That starts by lifting the caps.”
Residency training positions have expanded at a rate of just 1% a year, due in large part to a congressional cap on federal funding in the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. Most of the costs of residency training — about $171,855 per year, per resident on average, according to AAMC data — are supported by teaching hospitals and their faculty. Medicare (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) has historically paid for 21% of the training. However, that support has been largely frozen since 1997. A house bill introduced in March – the Resident Physician Shortage Reduction Act of 2019 (H.R. 1763) – would add up to 15,000 Medicare-funded residency positions over five years, similar to an AHA-supported bill introduced in April in the Senate.
How do you feel about a back to the future approach to residencies? Where residents are assigned to a working practitioner with a weekly touchstone session with the medschool doc who is running herd on that particular batch? At the end of each year, swap practitioners.
