Family Medicine Wins or Loses?

On the day before graduation at the University of Nevada School of Medicine, where I am Chairman of the Department of Family and Community Medicine, the school recognizes students who have performed well during an awards ceremony. The ceremony also offers an opportunity for students from both our Reno and Las Vegas campuses to recognize the faculty mentors who were important to them during their training through individual and departmental awards.

This year, I was honored to receive the Tow Humanism award and the Clinical Faculty Teacher of the Year award for Reno, while Kate Martin, M.D., assistant professor in family and community medicine, won the clinical teaching award for Las Vegas. Amanda Magrini, M.D., the chief resident in our family medicine residency, received the Resident Teacher of the Year award.

Not one clinical award was presented to a department other than family medicine, which also won Clinical Department of the Year awards for both Reno and Las Vegas.

You might think with this level of recognition that our family medicine program would be well on its way to recruiting more students into our specialty.

Not so fast. Only five of our 64 graduates this year chose family medicine.

Our country has recognized the need for more physicians -- specifically, primary care physicians -- and our medical schools have responded by increasing enrollments. In 2009, there were 15,638 U.S. medical school graduates who participated in the National Resident Matching Program. This year, that number increased by nearly 2,000 to 17,487, an increase of almost 12 percent.

Meanwhile, family medicine residency training programs increased the number of available slots by almost 300 (from 2,764 in 2012 to 3,062 in 2013). The number of U.S. graduates going into family medicinealso increased compared with last year's figure, but only by 39.

That slight increase in U.S. graduates filling family medicine positions combined with the much larger increase in the number of U.S. graduates overall means that the percentage of U.S. graduates choosing family medicine actually went down, from 48.4 percent in 2012 to 44.9 percent in 2013.

The bottom line is that we have a need for more family physicians, and we have more available students to match to family medicine. And yet, a lower percentage of U.S. graduates are choosing our specialty.

Read more:

Family Medicine Wins … or Loses?