By 2020, studies suggest there could be a shortage of at least 35,000 primary care physicians.
The Department of Family Medicine is responding to those concerns by expanding its residency program next summer for the first time in more than a decade, thanks to nearly $1 million of federal funds.
Family Medicine will receive a $960,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS, to increase the number of residents in its three-year program from 10 to 11 per year.
The grant will allow Family Medicine to continue recruiting 11 residents for the next five years. In July 2011, the department will welcome its first 11-member residency class.
“Over the total funding period, there will be five more University of Michigan-trained primary care physicians produced because of this grant,” says Dr. Jim Cooke, assistant professor of family medicine and U-M’s Family Medicine residency director.
The grant is part of a $168 million initiative to expand the primary care workforce in response to a projected shortfall of primary care physicians. The anticipated shortage stems from a combination of an aging population and increasing number of Americans who receive health insurance.
“This is significant in that it is the first expansion in the residency program since 1996, when the program increased from eight residents per year to 10 per year,” Cooke says.
The grant will bolster the primary care workforce and also strengthen the roles of wellness and prevention in the American health care system, says Kathleen Sebelius, HHS secretary.
“Chronic diseases, most of which are preventable, are one of the main reasons health care costs have soared over the past several decades,” Sebelius says. “Investing in our primary care workforce will strengthen the role that wellness and prevention play in our health care system. With these grants, Americans from all backgrounds will have new opportunities to enter the health care workforce.”
In 1997 the Balanced Budget Act capped funding for graduate medical education programs. Under the act, the Robert Graham Center for Policy Studies in Family Medicine and Primary Care reported the net loss of 390 first-year family medicine resident positions, 865 general internal medicine positions and the loss of 40 family medicine and 25 internal medicine programs.
Final approval of the Family Medicine residency program’s expansion is pending, but Cooke says faculty and residents are optimistic about the outcome.
