Black medical professionals are being courted by the Senate to help fill the gaps caused by a health care workforce shortage that is expected to leave the U.S. with more than 100,000 fewer doctors over the next decade.
But Black physicians point to key deterrents to entering and staying in the industry, including a “broken” system that perpetuates mounting debt, unfair compensation, lack of investment in Black medical students and the mistreatment of medical professionals during the height of the crisis. Covid-19 pandemic.
“Our system is broken and we, as family physicians, are not being fairly compensated for the time we spend saving lives while sacrificing our own well-being,” Samuel Cook, a family physician at Morehouse School of Medicine, said during a roundtable discussion led by Senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. at the school in Atlanta.
“For far too long, we have fallen through the cracks of a healthcare system that blatantly and openly abuses our binding investments in this area, and it is high time that our plight is heard, appreciated and acted upon,” Cook said. continued.
What is the crisis?
According to the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), there will be an estimated physician shortage of as many as 124,000 physicians by 2034. Demand for physicians is expected to exceed physician placement due to the aging of the U.S. population.
A 2022 report from Definitive Healthcare, a healthcare data and analytics company, found that approximately 230,000 healthcare professionals – physicians, nurses, physician assistants, physical therapists and licensed clinical social workers – left the industry in the fourth quarter of 2021 have left.
Medical professionals say the mental, physical and emotional burnout caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has caused workers to leave the profession to avoid the risk of unknown dangers of an unprecedented medical crisis.
“Hospital leaders treated RNs and other hospital workers as expendable during the pandemic. They didn’t care whether we lived or died, refused to provide life-saving personal protective equipment until forced to, and now they’re wondering why nurses fled the bedside,” Deborah Burger, a registered nurse and president of National Nurses United, said in a statement to Yahoo News.
Research shows that approximately 47% of healthcare workers will leave their jobs by 2025. Sanders wants to allay concerns that the US may not be ready for a new pandemic due to the deficit.
“We don’t have the public health infrastructure we need on a state-by-state basis. We certainly don’t have the doctors and nurses we need,” Sanders said during the roundtable. “So what we’re trying to do now is create legislation that will create more doctors, more nurses and more dentists.”
What is the difference between black doctors?
Currently, Black physicians make up only 5.7% of physicians in the US
The AAMC says one reason for the lack of black physicians can be traced to the 1910 Flexner Report, commissioned by the American Medical Association and the Carnegie Foundation to establish a gold standard for medical education. The report led to the closure of more than half of U.S. medical schools in the early 20th century. This included five of the seven historically black medical schools.
“The shortage is especially acute in rural and medically underserved communities, where access to quality health care is often limited,” Jeannette E. South-Paul, executive vice president and provost of Meharry Medical College in Nashville, told Sanders during her testimony.
Meharry Medical College is one of only four historically black medical schools. According to the AAMC, HBCUs make up less than 3% of all MD degree-granting institutions, but have siphoned off more than half of all Black graduates from the medical field.
The pandemic has also exposed chronic health care disparities in minority communities, such as access to medical treatment and premature deaths due to pre-existing conditions, which place a disproportionate burden on Black and brown communities.
“HBCU medical schools are uniquely positioned to address this shortage given our longstanding commitment to educating healthcare professionals from diverse backgrounds who are committed to serving in these underserved areas,” Dr. Valerie Montgomery Rice, president of Morehouse School of Medicine, told CNN.
What is the solution?
Sanders has said more efforts are needed to attract diverse candidates to the medical profession by creating a pipeline from high school to college. But Black physicians and heads of Black medical schools want to ensure that Black medical professionals are set up for success.
Many schools have supported a bipartisan proposal from Congress, the Resident Physician Shortage Reduction Act of 2023, which would increase the number of Medicare-funded residencies by 14,000 over seven years. School leaders support the plan.
Sanders has proposed canceling $1.6 trillion in student debt, which he says will “shrink the racial wealth gap for young Americans by more than half” and “free up doctors and nurses to work in communities that need healthcare.” need most.”
Additionally, Congress’ “Pathway to Practice” proposal and the National Medical Corps Act grant programs would prioritize applications from HBCUs, Minority-Serving Institutions (MSI), and underserved communities.
AAMC also encourages increasing federal investments in MSIs to address the debt of students underrepresented in medicine and to expand medical schools.
“But the more than 150 other medical schools, in addition to our four historically black medical schools, also owe it to the country to increase the diversity of the students they train,” Rice emphasized, which would help address disparities in affected communities Reduce.
Healthcare professionals are also supporting efforts to reduce burnout, an issue Congress aimed to address with a 2022 law aimed at improving mental and behavioral health.
