There is an epidemic shortage of family physicians doing primary care in this country, and no one coming behind them to make up the gap. U.S. medical school students going into primary care has dropped 51.8 percent in the last decade, according to the American Academy of Family Physicians.
But there is a solution – and you can find it right around the corner from our central office headquarters at RHD. More and more, nurse practitioners at our Family Practice and Counseling Network are expertly rising up to be primary care practitioners for people in need.
It takes 10 years to educate a doctor, and medical school costs something like a billion dollars a year (that’s a guess, but I think it’s close). The pipeline of family physicians is drying up. According to the AAFP, the demand in our healthcare system will spike dramatically over the next 10 years, as 78 million baby Boomers turn 65 and will require more medical care. Added to the current mass of underserved patients, and you’re looking at a shortage of about 40,000 family physicians in the U.S.
The nurse practitioners in
RHD’s health centers are highly skilled and tremendously effective, and proud we are of all of them. As the need for health care increases, and the availability of traditional family physicians markedly decreases, more and more people will turn to nurse-run health centers. As always, we’ll be there for them.