April 10, 2008
Community health-trained docs tend to help underserved
UW researchers have found that family medicine physicians trained in community health centers were more likely to work in underserved settings than their non-community health center-trained counterparts. The results appear in a study published in the April issue of the journal Family Medicine.
The news comes on the heels of last month’s announcement from the National Resident Matching Program that there is an increased interest in family medicine and more residency positions in that field available across the United States. In addition, the need for family physicians is expected to skyrocket by 2020 to nearly 140,000 doctors, according to the American Academy of Family Physicians.
Scant research has been conducted in the family medicine residency-community health center (CHC) realm, despite an affiliation that dates back more than 25 years. CHCs are federally funded primary care clinics that provide care for underinsured and uninsured patients.
With a continued increase in the numbers of uninsured, the recent economic downturn and the anticipated doubling in numbers of physicians needed in CHCs, the UW study results suggest one strategy to bring more health providers to underserved areas is by ensuring there are residency programs based in those centers.
The UW research team, led by Carl Morris, assistant professor of family medicine, conducted a cross-sectional survey of the 838 graduates from the WWAMI (Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and Idaho) Family Medicine Residency network from 1986 to 2002 to reach their conclusion. They found that 64 percent of physicians in the study who trained in community health centers worked in underserved settings, compared to 37 percent of those who were not trained in the centers.
Because there are no national data to identify either the number of family medicine residencies affiliated with CHCs or the number of residents training with them, more research is needed to better understand the relationship, researchers cautioned.
