Family physicians call for more residency slots

The specialty-specific research complements national physician work force shortage numbers that others have calculated.

By Myrle Croasdale, AMNews Staff. Oct. 16, 2006.

By 2020, the American Academy of Family Physicians says the United States will need nearly 39% more doctors in their specialty than exist now.

The AAFP says the nation will need 139,531 family physicians by 2020 and has made a state-by-state breakdown of this estimate. There were 100,431 family physicians in 2004, according to data the AAFP compiled.

More primary care physicians have been needed for some time, but the problem has been exacerbated by an increasing population and a declining number of medical students moving into primary care, said Perry Pugno, MD, MPH, director of the AAFP's medical education division.

The AAFP is calling for family medicine residencies to expand from an average of 21 to 24 residents.

"We're going to need to graduate 3,725 family physicians each year by 2020 or we'll not meet that need, and more and more Americans will have difficulty accessing primary care," Dr. Pugno said. According to the AAFP, there were 3,617 family medicine graduates in 2006.

Dr. Pugno acknowledged that increasing the number of family medicine residents would be challenging in an environment where many of the specialty's existing residencies don't fill and some have closed down altogether. "We need the government to fix the way payments are done," he said.

The AAFP adopted the shortage estimate as policy during its annual meeting in the last week of September in Washington, D.C. The organization also confirmed existing policy that half of all primary care physicians should be family physicians.