Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms. In honor of this day, let’s talk about raising young family physicians.
Though the match in family medicine for residency slots was a little better this year than last year, it is still miles from where it needs to be. Only a little over half the residency slots are filled by U.S. medical school graduates.
The Dept. of Health and Human Services in June of last year announced $168 million to create even more primary care residency slots. We don’t need more slots until all the current ones are all taken by American medical school graduates.
The nurturing of these future family physicians in residency training is not the issue. The realities of practice life are the issue.
Mamas, still let your babies grow up to be family physicians. It’s a wonderful profession we are privileged to be a part of. Just do what you can to help them become the foundation for the American healthcare system they ought to be.
Isn’t that just like government? Trying to fix a problem (not enough family physicians) by expanding its size (number of empty residency chairs).
And of course the move to create more residency slots was aggressively supported by the truly clueless AAFP leadership. If all the energy and money that the AAFP has put into EMR, PCMH, and ACA had been put into working for real payment reform, our specialty may have had a future. Unfortunately, it seems to be too late.