Health Care Shortage Essay

690 Words2 Pages

When discussing the impending health care shortage, many people start with the simple question of “Can we not just train more physicians” to which the answer is not really. As Nathan mentioned we could just train people on how to operate on patients the level that would be expected in a physician, however, the problem is deeper than just training more people. Training more people costs money, money that hospitals may not have. To understand this one must understand the current state of medical education. First of all, medical schools are accepting more students, in fact, between the years 2002 and 2016, the number of medical schools enrollees has increased by 27.5% (Association of American Medical Colleges, 2016). The problem arises once these medical students try to get residencies. Graduate medical education, also known as residencies, are funded by a combination of Medicare, Medicaid, and the hospitals themselves. As of today, there is a cap on the funding that hospitals receive to train residents, so when the number of medical students rose, the funding did not. This lack …show more content…

Nurses, and in particular nurse practitioners, have already the training needed to provide the level care necessary and are already efficient at providing care due to the nature of their work. It makes sense to allow nurses to provide primary care to at the very least alleviate the effects of the shortage and reduce the current dependence of physicians the country currently has. Nurse practitioners according to studies have shown to be better than physicians when it comes to patient follow up, provision of screening, assessments and counseling services (Cassidy, 2012). Furthermore giving NP’s the role of primary care clinicians would be a much faster fix to the shortage since it takes on average 6 years to complete their education and training verse the 11 to 12 years it would take a physician (Cassidy,

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