Shortage on the way (UMN) Listen Medical school warns of residency crunch

Jan 10, 2014

A national training bottleneck threatens Minnesotas ability to fill increased demand for doctors in coming years, University of Minnesota medical school officials warn.

Stagnant federal and state funding has limited the number of residency positions where they can train. Unless the number of residencies increases Minnesota will be short a projected 2,000 physicians a decade from now, they say.

If you want to be able to control your workforce and have workforce available in the future, youve got to build your own, said Troy Taubenheim, director of the Metro Minnesota Council on Graduate Medical Education.

Tens of thousands of new patients are expected to flood hospitals in the state over the next decade many of them aging Baby Boomers and those newly insured under the Affordable Care Act, according to numbers provided by Taubenheim.

Meanwhile, close to half of the states physicians will be old enough to retire within a decade. If they do, Taubenheims figures indicate, under current conditions the state will be able to replace fewer than half of them.

Simply expanding medical school enrollment wont produce enough doctors to fill such gaps because of a training bottleneck, health officials say.

After students graduate from medical school, they cant practice until they receive several years of training in hospitals and clinics training known as a residency.

The problem is that the number of residencies is effectively capped by government funding.

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U of M med school warns of doc shortage