Black medical professionals are being courted to fill the gap in the health care workforce shortage crisis, which is expected to leave the U.S. with more than 100,000 fewer doctors as demand for them increases over the next decade.
But black doctors are touting a “broken” system that creates mounting debt, unfair compensation, lack of investment in black medical students, and the mistreatment of medical professionals during the height of the COVID pandemic as key deterrents to breaking into and getting into the industry to stay.
“Our system is broken and we, as GPs, are not being compensated fairly for our time spent saving lives while sacrificing our own well-being,” said Dr. Samuel Cook, MD., a family physician at Morehouse School of Medicine. during a roundtable discussion at the Atlanta school.
“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 our plight was heard, appreciated and acted upon,” Dr. Cook continued.
What is the Crisis?
According to the (AAMC), by 2034 there will be an estimated physician shortage of up to 124,000 physicians. Demand for physicians is expected to exceed actual physician placements due to a growing aging of the US population.
A 2022 report from Definitive Healthcare, a healthcare data tracking and analytics company, reveals that approximately 230,000 healthcare professionals — physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, physical therapists, and licensed clinical social workers — will have entered the industry in the fourth quarter of 2021. to leave.
Medical professionals say mental, physical and emotional burnout from the COVID pandemic overwhelmingly impacted hospitals and practices led workers to leave the profession to avoid the risk of unknown dangers of an unprecedented medical crisis.
“Hospital managers treated RNs and other hospital staff as expendable during the pandemic, they didn’t care if we lived or died, they refused to provide life-saving personal protective equipment until forced to do so, and now they wonder why nurses have fled the bed, Deborah Burger, RN and president of National Nurses United, said in a statement to Yahoo News.
Surveys predict that about 47% of healthcare workers will quit their jobs by 2025. Sanders is trying to address concerns that the US may not be ready for another pandemic because of the deficit.
“We don’t have the public health infrastructure that we need state by state. We certainly don’t have the doctors and nurses we need,” said the roundtable. “So what we’re trying to do now is bring forward legislation, which will create more doctors and more nurses, more dentists.”
What is the disparity between black doctors?
Currently, black physicians make up the American physician population.
The AAMC says one of the reasons for the lack of black doctors can be traced back to a mandate from the American Medical Association and the Carnegie Foundation to establish a gold standard for medical training. The report caused more than half of America’s medical schools to close by the early 1900s. This included five of the seven black medical schools.
“The shortage is particularly acute in rural areas and medically backward communities, where access to quality health care is often limited,” said Jeannette E. South-Paul, MD and executive vice president and provost at Meharry Medical College. in Nashville, Tennessee, to Sanders. during her testimony.
Meharry Medical College is just one of four historically black medical schools. Among all MD degree-granting institutions, HBCUs have pumped out more than half of all black medical graduates, according to the AAMC.
The pandemic also exposed chronic health care issues, such as access to medical treatment and premature death from pre-existing conditions, which placed 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 the Morehouse School of Medicine, .
What is the solution?
Sanders has said more effort should be made to attract diverse candidates to the medical profession by creating a pipeline from high school to college. But black doctors and heads of black medical schools want to make sure black medical professionals are primed for success to help communities.
Many schools have backed a bipartisan congressional bill, the , which would increase the number of Medicare-funded residency slots by 14,000 over seven years. School leaders support the plan.
Sanders has proposed that he believes will “shrink the racial wealth gap for young Americans by more than half” and “free up doctors and nurses to work in communities most in need of care.”
In addition, Congress’s “Pathway to Practice” proposal and National Medical Corps Act scholarship programs would prioritize applications from HBCUs, Minority-Serving Institutions (MSI), and underserved communities.
AAMC is also encouraging increasing federal investment in MSIs to address debt for underrepresented students in medicine and to expand medical schools.
“But the other 150-plus 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 stressed, which would help reduce inequality in affected communities .
Health care professionals also support efforts to reduce burnout, an issue Congress sought to address with the goal of improving mental and behavioral health.
