Nation must help foreign doctors

The shortage of doctors is a real dilemma nowadays, especially under the Affordable Care Act. And in the coming years, this dearth of doctors will only be exacerbated.

Matthew Torres | Daily Trojan

Though there will be 30 million more citizens insured for healthcare, there will not be enough professionals ready to give that care. This is a critical misstep for the newly implemented system.

According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, the United States is currently short of an estimated 20,000 doctors, a number that could nearly quintuple over the next decade.

One solution to the physician shortage in California is new legislation that would allow physician assistants, nurse practitioners, pharmacists and optometrists more authority and autonomy in medical treatment. Another promising idea is to facilitate the path for foreign doctors to become licensed in the United States.

Unbeknownst to many Americans, there are thousands of immigrant physicians in the U.S. whose life-saving skills go unused. It’s nearly impossible for immigrant doctors to practice in the United States. Current circumstances demand that it shouldn’t be this difficult. For the majority of immigrant doctors, the process will consume more than a decade. The process requires doctors to prove they speak English, pass three separate steps of the United States Medical Licensing Examination, get American recommendation letters and be a permanent resident or receive a work visa, after they apply to a private nonprofit organization that verifies medical school transcripts and diplomas.

And yet, the biggest challenge, according to The New York Times. is winning a slot in America’s medical residency system.

It doesn’t help that Congress effectively froze residency funding in 1997, according to The Times.

The residency match rate for immigrants is projected to decrease more steeply, a consequence of the substantial increase in the number of accredited American medical schools and the fixed number of residency slots.

To make things more complicated, test scores of immigrant doctors do not fairly reflect their talents and skills. Sajith Abeyawickrama, a Sri Lankan anesthesiologist, said that he failed to pass three years in a row but blames it on the new program. “I had the knowledge, but I did not know the art of the exams here,” he said to The New York Times.

And yet, as a testament to his talents, he was recently offered a two-year research fellowship at Cleveland Clinic.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of elderly Americans will double by 2050, increasing the demand for medical services. Plus, according to Hospital and Health Networks magazine, more than 250,000 of 700,000 active physicians were over age 55 in 2009, indicating many impending retirements in the next decade. A report published in the Annals of Family Medicine projected a physician shortfall of 52,000 by 2025. The Motley Fool, however, states that “research data indicated this need for more doctors is 18 percent higher than it would have been without implementation of Obamacare.”

Balancing supply and demand for doctors in America could definitely be helped by “passive recruitment,” a policy that advocates an increase in the number of funded slots at U.S. residency programs and goes hand-in-hand with relaxation of current restrictions and bureaucratic regulations.

Some might argue that by simplifying this process, Americans are lowering the standards of care and allowing less proficiently trained physicians to practice, jeopardizing patient safety. This, however, is a description of “active recruitment,” not the passive path proposed above. “Active recruitment,” as termed by Remapping Debate, entails completely lifting the requirement that foreign physicians pursuing a U.S. license must complete a residency program here. Canada and the United Kingdom have embraced this method.

Complete residency training in America, however, should still be seen as the foremost safeguard for ensuring quality of care. Other creative solutions to easing the residency slot shortage without comprising quality of care are out there as well. For instance, the UCLA International Medical Graduate Program offers foreign-born physicians a stipend along with board prep classes, mentorship and references to help them find a residency in primary care medicine. Enrollees must agree to work in an underserved  area of the state two to three years after receiving a license.

According to California Healthline, the program has placed 54 hispanic physicians into family medicine training programs, a step in the right direction considering the fact that 40 percent of California residents are hispanic or latino, but only 5 percent of licensed doctors here are hispanic or latino, according to Kaiser Health News.

There’s still a long way to go, but implementing these programs could create a promising outlook for the doctor dilemma.

Valerie Yu is a sophomore majoring in English and biological sciences.