More Med Students Won’t Mean More Doctors

WSJ Health Blog

After 25 years without much growth, the U.S. is about to start cranking out lots more young MDs. The number of first-year med students will grow 20% between 2002 and 2012, according to a report out this week from the Association of American Medical Colleges.

As new schools open and existing schools expand, the number of first-year students will be 20,000 by 2012, according to the report. During the same period, the number of first-year students at osteopathic med schools (which grant the DO degree) is expected to grow from about 2,000 to a little over 5,000.

Expanding med schools here will be good news for all those nervous pre-meds fighting for scarce slots, but it may not do much to ease what many believe is a looming physician shortage.

After med school, young docs have to go through medical residency before they can strike out on their own — and there are already well over 20,000 residency slots every year.
The gap between the number of graduating U.S. MDs and DOs and the number of first-year residents is filled by grads of foreign med schools. Among those starting residencies this summer, more than 1,500 are U.S. citizens who graduated from overseas schools, and another 3,100 are foreign grads of those schools, according to the National Resident Match Program. Thousands more applied for slots and didn’t get them.

So the real question is what’s going to happen to the number of residency slots. “I really can’t predict what’s likely,” Edward Salsberg, who runs the AAMC’s Center for Workforce Studies, told the Health Blog. “I had been thinking we would see a slow, very limited growth.” But the feds are the source of most residency funding, and Washington’s been making noises to suggest more residency dollars may not be coming anytime soon, Salsberg said.
That means the number of ready-to-practice doctors coming out of the pipeline may be about the same in four or five years as it is now.

(c)Wall Street Journal