James March-April 2024 online - Flipbook - Page 72
its healthcare workforce issues; it will
take vision, cooperation, and will. We
recommend these concrete steps:
Leverage existing medical schools to ensure each has the faculty, physician-scientists, and clinical and research facilities to compete with other states with
far better physician-to-population ratios.
Leverage existing nursing colleges
throughout Georgia. Do they have the faculty and space to compete with states with
far better nurse-to-population ratios?
Bring academia together with where
healthcare is delivered (hospitals, nursing
homes, physician practices, and clinics of
every kind) to see what cooperation and
breaking down silos might accomplish.
Finally, we must look at Graduate Medical
Education. Physicians are more likely to
remain in the states where they train, and
Georgia loses 75 percent of our MD graduates to other states for their residencies
and fellowships.
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JAMES
M ARCH/ A PR I L 2024
There is a nursing
workforce shortage
across the state.
Georgia can and
must do better.
LAURIE OTT
Georgia also has hundreds of
unfilled GME slots, including 179 in
high-need areas of Family, Internal
and Emergency Medicines, General
Surgery, Obstetrics, Pediatrics and
Psychiatry. Meanwhile, why, with
a US population shift to the South
and West, does Medicare spending
on GME contribute to the growing
disparity between where physician
training is funded and where the
population is expanding. We must FIO
and better understand the complex
issue of growing both the quantity
and quality of GME in the state.
Steps have moved us in the
right direction: the Board of Regents
GREAT Committee, which grew residencies in the state by more than 800
slots, is one example. The governor
has expanded nursing programs within the USG by 500 nursing students a
year over five years.
But our collective efforts must be
larger in magnitude and scope, and
take significant, bold, far-reaching, collaborative steps to give Georgia the
healthcare workforce its citizens need
and deserve. Lives depend on it!
Laurie Ott has more than 17 years of nonprofit
leadership experience. She is the principal consultant at an independent project, The Georgia Higher
Education Health Care Initiative.
