This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citing articles on Web of Science (1)  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

James Sobel, MD
Cooper Hospital/University Medical Center Camden, NJ

JAMA. 1985;253(6):777-778.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.—

While preparing a talk for house staff and medical students on the "realities" of the physician surplus, I calculated that the surplus is not likely to occur.

The Graduate Medical Education National Advisory Committee (GMENAC) assumed first-year allopathic enrollment would increase 10% from 1978 to 1982 and then reach a steady state.¹ As can be seen in the Table, GMENAC enrollment assumptions were never met.

The actual increase from 1978 to 1982 was 3.7%. "Steady-state" projections of enrollment by the medical schools are approximately 16,490 by 1986.³ This is a difference of 9% between the GMENAC-assumed steady state and medical school— projected steady state. Incidentally, one might argue that GMENAC's call for aggregate reduction in class size has been met.

If GMENAC's projection of 535,750 physicians in 1990 represents a 70,000 (69,750) physician surplus, and the assumptions used to create that surplus are inflated approximately . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?