Word: careful
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Wertheim College is an idea that couldn't have come at a better time - not just for low-income communities in South Florida and elsewhere, but also for the broader cause of health-care reform. The U.S.'s chronic shortage of primary-care doctors has become "catastrophic," says Dr. Joseph Stubbs, president of the Philadelphia-based American College of Physicians, one of the nation's largest medical organizations. "If things continue as they are," says Stubbs, "by 2025, the U.S. will be 45,000 primary-care physicians short." That dearth of first-level preventive care will push even more...
...There are 100,000 primary-care physicians in the U.S. today, but they account for only a third of all doctors; the other two-thirds are specialists. The ratio, say most experts, should be at least 50-50, as it is in countries like Canada. But the number of U.S. medical students opting for primary-care careers has plummeted 52% over the past decade, according to the American Academy of Family Physicians. Fewer than 10% of the 2008 graduating class of medical students opted for a career in primary care, and only 42% of residency positions for family medicine...
...have a health-care system today that is geared toward the management of acute episodes instead of the appropriate preventive measures you see in other countries," says Dr. John Rock, dean of Wertheim College. "Because of the lack of family doctors, we're not dealing with obesity; we're dealing with the expensive diabetes hospitalizations that result from the obesity." (See the most common hospital mishaps...
...Wertheim College is not the first U.S. medical school to train community-based primary-care physicians. (Florida State University's medical school, for example, lets its third-year students do clinical work in rural areas of the state's Panhandle.) But it's considered the first to make that mission its raison d'être. Under its NeighborhoodHELP (Health Education Learning Program) scheme, which will forge permanent relationships with underserved zones of Miami, students are assigned a household along with counterparts from fields like nursing, social work and public health. Rock developed the idea with FIU's Dr. Pedro Greer...
...despite the obvious urgency, little will change unless more can be done to lure young docs back to primary care - and that means prime financial incentives. The average medical-school graduate carries a six-figure loan debt, so you don't have to be a brain surgeon to figure out why so many people are opting to be radiologists scoring $500,000 a year instead of general practitioners pocketing $150,000. Over the summer, President Obama announced the Public Service Student Loan Forgiveness Program, which erases big chunks of debt for medical students who do 10 years of primary-care...