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(EMAILWIRE.COM, December 25, 2012 ) San Francisco, CA -- Most general internal residents plan on specializing rather than continuing their careers as a general internist, a new study shows. Nearly 80% of general internal medicine students opt to specialize by their third year of residency. The trend is even more pronounced for categorical residents, international graduates and male residents in general.
Physicians published these findings online in the journal JAMA in early December.
While general internists fill an important role in providing comprehensive health care (a trend that is expected to intensify as more Americans live longer) fewer are graduating medical school without a sub-specialty. While not a crisis yet, many in the medical profession are concerned that a lack of general internal medicine specialists will pose problems in the coming years. American health care reform extends comprehensive health care coverage to more US citizens than ever before.
In the 1970s, more than 50% of internal medicine students graduated as general internists, but that number has plummeted to 25%-20% in the last few decades.
The authors of the study, including Dr. West of the Department of Health Sciences Research, and Dr. Drupas of the Mayo Clinic, said that:
"[T]his is the first national study to our knowledge reporting that even in primary care internal medicine residency programs dedicated to generalist and primary care training, a majority of graduates still reported plans to pursue subspecialty careers.”
"Thus, although primary care program graduates were twice as likely as categorical residents to report generalist career plans in their year of graduation, the early promise of these programs for producing general internists has been tempered by the more global decline in interest in general medicine."
Both Dr. West and Dr. Drupas are calling for thoughtful solutions to increasing the numbers of generalized-care physicians in the near-future: "Expanding medical school enrollment or the number of internal medicine residency positions may simply result in more subspecialists, if the number of specialty and fellowship slots is also increased.”
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Source: EmailWire.com
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