Huisartsgeneeskunde: aantrekkingskracht en beroepstrouw ... - Lirias
Huisartsgeneeskunde: aantrekkingskracht en beroepstrouw ... - Lirias
Huisartsgeneeskunde: aantrekkingskracht en beroepstrouw ... - Lirias
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78 Making G<strong>en</strong>eral Practice Attractive: Encouraging GP attraction and Ret<strong>en</strong>tion KCE Reports 90<br />
US federal and state policies<br />
In the 1990s, US federal and especially state policies were designed to mandate medical<br />
schools to "produce" more PCPs, which resulted in proportions of PCPs graduates<br />
reaching 25 to 35% in 1995, short of the 50% target however 150 . The particularity of<br />
these state policies is that they were not intrusive, they were unfunded mandates and<br />
mostly signals to hold medical schools accountable for producing more PCPs 150 .<br />
G<strong>en</strong>eralist Physician Initiative<br />
Private initiatives were also launched, e.g. the Robert Wood Foundation, which<br />
provided financial support to the G<strong>en</strong>eralist Physician Initiative (GPI) in 13 universities<br />
(1991-2001), targeting the supply of family practitioners, g<strong>en</strong>eral internists, and g<strong>en</strong>eral<br />
pediatricians 26 , 48 , 151 . Several aspects of the GPI are close to what was observed in<br />
Belgium with the developm<strong>en</strong>t of Academic C<strong>en</strong>ters of G<strong>en</strong>eral Medicine. The<br />
G<strong>en</strong>eralist Physician Initiative helped catalyze educational reform in medical schools that<br />
had had little educational change in two to three decades. Those changes included:<br />
• elevating g<strong>en</strong>eralist faculty into major leadership roles,<br />
• instituting new administrative structures to coordinate g<strong>en</strong>eralist<br />
activities,<br />
• increasing the number of g<strong>en</strong>eralist faculty.<br />
Some changes the schools carried out to promote g<strong>en</strong>eral practice were for example:<br />
• changing the admissions process to target more stud<strong>en</strong>ts with GP<br />
pot<strong>en</strong>tial, along with increasing the number of GPs on admissions<br />
committees,<br />
• developing high school and college undergraduate recruitm<strong>en</strong>t<br />
programs,<br />
• redesigning undergraduate medical education to include the primarycare<br />
community experi<strong>en</strong>ces, GP-ori<strong>en</strong>ted clinical medicine courses<br />
and GP clerkships.<br />
The G<strong>en</strong>eralist Physician Initiative increased output of GPs by approximately 39% during<br />
the course of the program, from a baseline of 26.4 % of graduates in 19881991 to<br />
36.7% of graduates in 1999. By 2000, there had be<strong>en</strong> a decline in GP graduates to 32.8<br />
perc<strong>en</strong>t of all graduates, so the final increase was 24 perc<strong>en</strong>t. Note that this tr<strong>en</strong>d in<br />
increased production of GPs may not be attributed solely to the GPI and that it is not<br />
either stable: national data show that after the mid-1990s peak, the number of PCPs is<br />
leveling off in the mid-2000s 152 . The causal effect of the GPI is th<strong>en</strong> questionable, and<br />
other inc<strong>en</strong>tives and determinants of career choice by physicians should be considered.<br />
Specific US initiatives for rural and deprived areas<br />
Since there is little evid<strong>en</strong>ce to support the idea that distributional issues would resolve<br />
by themselves, several education programs were developed in parallel by US medical<br />
schools to attract and train future GPs, with an acc<strong>en</strong>t on rural practice and<br />
underserved communities for some initiatives. Programs were initiated in the 1970s and<br />
the 1980s and are still operating (see Geyman et al 2000 153 and McDonald et al 2002<br />
154 ). Some of these programs were evaluated. See the following refer<strong>en</strong>ces : 50 , 56 , 57 , 87 , 89<br />
, 94 , 119 , 122 , 123 , 148 , 155 , 156 , 157 .<br />
All these programs concern small numbers of physicians (about 30 to 100/year).<br />
Common features of these programs include:<br />
• selection of stud<strong>en</strong>ts with rural background, with service ori<strong>en</strong>tation<br />
and interests in family medicine,<br />
• education in community medicine,