finish medical school in 3 years instead of 4 ?
Texas Tech University medical school is piloting a new program : complete medical school in 3 years instead of 4. the catch is, you must be going into primary care afterwards.
prior to this, all american medical schools based their curriculum on 4 years. [ except for one DO school ]
Texas Tech believes that for primary care physicians, they can condense the curriculum into 3. their reasoning seems plausible. you see, the 4th year is typically reserved for electives in specialized fields such as anesthesiology, urology, pathology, etc. Texas Tech contends that those students committed to going into primary care do not need electives teaching specialty fields. instead, they’ll make these students do a few primary care electives instead. they also plan to make students go to school during the summer [ gasp ! ]
students opting to go into this program will save a year’s worth of tuition and living expenses, finish their degree earlier, and start earning a salary earlier.
not a bad deal !
the goal of the program is to encourage more students to go into primary care. valiant effort. but if you REALLY want to get more primary care doctors out there….
OPEN MORE PRIMARY CARE RESIDENCY SPOTS.
if we don’t open more spots where we can train primary care doctors, all we are going to have is a bunch of doctors not able to do much after medical school. [ yes getting a job as a doctor without residency experience is tough ]
now, i really don’t know how the funding works for residency programs but i hope whoever is in a position that knows, will advocate funding for more primary care spots.
in a recent post i wrote about how Family Medicine did in the match this year, it shows that there were 75 more spots available then the previous year.
Good! that’s a start! but there’s still a long way to go.
remember, the article said ten years ago there were 3300 spots, and now there are only 2600.
rant aside, what do you think of the 3 year medical school program?
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