Dartmouth Medical School is increasing its class size after about five years of reduced admissions. The Association of American Medical Colleges this year asked med schools to boost enrollment in the hopes of curbing an impending doctor shortage. New Hampshire Public Radio’s Kerry Grens has more.
In the coming years Dartmouth Medical School will graduate about ten percent more MDs.
This is in accord with a nationwide request by the Association of American Medical Colleges to get 10 to 15 percent more doctors into the workforce in the next decade.
AAMC President Dr. Jordan Cohen says the current workforce is insufficient to treat an aging population with a high demand for healthcare services.
Cohen: At the same time, doctors are aging--the cohort of doctors in practice are actually older than the population as a whole--so doctors will be retiring reasonably soon in fairly large numbers at a time when new doctors who are coming into the workforce have a tendency to work fewer hours just as a generational phenomenon.
The US is expected to be about ninety thousand doctors short by 2020.
Cohen says this could leave many people—particularly those in rural or inner city areas that already have low numbers of doctors—in dire healthcare straights.
But the AAMC recommendation has fallen on welcome ears.
Cohen: in fact the polling that we’ve done among our members suggests that there already had been even before our recommendation some decisions and plans to increase class sizes to some extent and there are also some medical schools that are being thought about and proposed in some parts of the country.
The number of medical school graduates has held steady for over twenty years—at about sixteen thousand a year.
Dartmouth graduates about sixty six.
That number shrank from seventy two five years ago when a training hospital for Dartmouth’s med students threatened closing its surgical unit.
This never happened, and the school’s Senior Associate Dean for Medical Education Dr. David Nierenberg, says the school can now go back to its former size.
But it’s not as easy as simply adding desks.
Nierenberg says additional faculty, laboratories, and sites for clinical training must be added.
And then there’s the issue of where these additional students go after they graduate.
Nierenberg: They’re going to need residency positions and unless something opens up there nationally in terms of medicare or other types of funding, hospitals are going to be able to increase their number of residency spots by ten or fifteen percent.
Nierenberg is confident that Dartmouth has the resources to accommodate more students.
And he sees the school’s growth as part of an obligation to make sure northern New England has enough doctors.
Nierenberg: We really feel this is an important thing to do not only nationally because our students end up all over the country but also regionally because so many of our students wish to come back and practice in their backyard of New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine.
Enrollment increases will begin gradually over the next few years.
SOQ
