Year: 2008
Type: editorial
Abstract: U.S. medical schools are in the midst of a significant expansion in their capacity to train new physicians (Cooper, Stoflet, and Wartman 2003), with recent reports from the American Association of Medical Colleges indicating plans that would increase the aggregate U.S. medical school class size 17 percent by 2012 (AAMC 2007).These efforts have been driven by, among other things, official calls from the Council on Graduate Medical Education for a 15 percent expansion in medical school enrollment (Council on Graduate Medical Education 2005), and the AAMC, which has reportedly called for 30 percent more U.S. medical school graduates annually (Goodman and Grumbach 2008).Coupled with activities aimed at expanding funding for residency programs, expansion of medical school capacity would tend to expand physician supply.Efforts to expand physician supply reflect a variety of factors including concerns about potential doctor shortages as the population grows and ages, the hope that more physicians will help address concerns about quality of care, and the view that adding to the pool of physicians could help address the fact that physicians are currently not well distributed around the country.While these efforts may be well intentioned, they deserve considerable scrutiny, as there are many reasons to be concerned that expansions of supply that are not carefully considered may not meet their stated goals.In this issue of HSR, the research by Gravelle, Morris, and Sutton highlights one key aspect of discussions about physician supply: the specialty distribution.They studied the relationship between the supply of family practice physicians in the ''local areas'' that are part of the health care system in England, and the self-reported health of individuals living in those areas.Using three different measures of health status, they report evidence that increases in the supply of family practice physicians are associated with improvements in health.One of the notable aspects of this study is its recognition of the potential for reverse causality--it may be that aspects of the health of the local population drive changes in family practice physician supply, not the r Health Research and Educational Trust
Source: Health Services Research
Author: Laurence Baker
Language: English
Subfield: Emergency Medical Services
Field: Health Professions
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W314500462