Friday, August 29, 2014

Rural doctor shortages can be attributed to not enough rural residents applying to medical school

The main problem with doctor shortages in rural America is that not enough rural Americans are applying to medical school and most medical schools are located in cities far from rural life, Olga Khazan reports for The Atlantic. "There are about 6,000 federally designated areas with a shortage of primary care doctors in the U.S., and 4,000 with a shortage of dentists. Rural areas have about 68 primary care doctors per 100,000 people, compared with 84 in urban centers. Put another way, about a fifth of Americans live in rural areas, but barely a tenth of physicians practice there."

However, "The breakdown starts with medical education: There are too few applicants from rural areas applying to medical school," Howard Rabinowitz, professor of family medicine at Thomas Jefferson University's Medical College, told CNN. "And about half of the ones who do come from the countryside don't wish to return there after they graduate."

"Medical students with country roots are more likely to return . . . but some studies suggest rural students are less likely to go to college in the first place," Khazan writes. "Residents practice near where they train, but many of the nation's most prestigious medical schools are in big cities—and they are less likely to enroll rural students."

"After eight grueling years of school and with hundreds of thousands in student loan debt, many doctors are reluctant to give up a city's creature comforts for a more hardscrabble existence," Khazan writes. "A recent poll by Sermo, a social network for doctors, found that a lack of cultural opportunities topped the list of reasons it was hard to recruit rural physicians." (Read more (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention map: Primary care doctors per 100,000 people in 2012)

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