BMJ  2007;335:236-238 (4 August), doi:10.1136/bmj.39246.598345.94

Analysis

Expanding the US medical workforce: global perspectives and parallels

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 624 North Broadway, Baltimore, MD 21205, USA

America's medical schools are gearing up for their biggest expansion in decades. But Jonathan P Weiner argues that more doctors is not the answer to the country's healthcare problems and calls for a more international approach

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The American medical education community has reached a consensus that a shortage of doctors is looming. Several years of heated discourse, dominated by current and former medical school deans, culminated in an influential position paper by the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) calling for an urgent and immediate expansion of US medical students by 30%.¹

The arguments for expansion have been discussed fully elsewhere,^{2 3 4 5} They include the belief that patients will soon want and need more services than the current stock of doctors can provide, newly trained doctors will be unwilling or unable to see as many patients each week as in the past, and the US should not be so reliant on doctors trained abroad. But is there really a problem?

The supply of US doctors has grown faster than the patient population for many decades (fig 1). The proportion of doctors that are generalists has been . . . [Full text of this article]

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