Just 25.2 percent of new physicians enter the primary care field after leaving their residencies, suggesting residency programs produce too few primary care physicians to meet the nation's needs, according to a study by researchers at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services.
SPHHS researchers studied career paths of 8,977 physicians who graduated from 759 residency sites from 2006 to 2008 and analyzed data to see where the physicians were practicing three to five years after graduation.
The researchers found 25.2 percent of the physicians wound up as practicing primary care physicians; however, they determined this as an over-estimate of the actual number of primary care physicians because it includes hospitalists, according to the news release.
Here are some further findings from the study:
• Just 4.8 percent of physicians practice in rural areas.
• 198 institutions produced no rural physicians.
• 283 institutions had no graduating physicians go on to practice in federally qualified health centers.
• The 20 institutes that produced the most primary care graduates received $292 million in graduate medical education funding.
• The 20 institutes that produced the least primary care graduates received $842 million in GME funding. This amount "reflects not a dedication to training doctors in primary care but in churning out highly paid specialists who typically practice in big cities or the suburbs," the release noted.
"If residency programs do not ramp up the training of these physicians, the shortage in primary care, especially in remote areas, will get worse," Candice Chen, MD, assistant research professor of health policy at SPHHS and lead study author, said in the release.
These findings are from a report released in the journal Academic Medicine. The research was funded by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation.
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