Wichita’s doctor training a state issue

doctorBecause the Wichita Center for Graduate Medical Education serves the state and supplies so many of its primary care physicians, the center’s funding gap — $22 million over the next two years — is a state problem. So it was good to see the Kansas Board of Regents agree Thursday that more money is crucial, and create a task force to work on the issue. Meanwhile, the center is only slated to receive $1 million in the fiscal 2009 budget, though legislators are still trying to come up with more. State lawmakers, University of Kansas officials and regents must help find sustaining funding for Wichita’s doctor-training program, or Kansas may find itself hurting for doctors.

5 Comments

  1. Phantom
    Posted March 17, 2008 at 6:15 am | Permalink

    I’ll let someone else have the first post here!

  2. Regular
    Posted March 17, 2008 at 6:44 am | Permalink

    What’s the problem? I mean Wichita wants to vote in a 350 million dollar bond to build new gyms and art facilities for Public Schools.

    If they need the 22 million dollars, I can’t imagine why there would be ANY impediment in getting it, especially considering the importance of training Doctors.

    But hey! Gymnasiums or Doctors? A choice there you know.

  3. Frank Pantangele
    Posted March 17, 2008 at 6:53 am | Permalink

    Rhonda,

    What spending elsewhere in the budget do you recommend be cut to fund this “priority”?

  4. American Way
    Posted March 17, 2008 at 8:38 am | Permalink

    And those new Doc’s, are they going to hang out in Kansas?

  5. NN
    Posted March 17, 2008 at 1:42 pm | Permalink

    More than 55% of MD grads hereabouts are women, which is fine. The fallout is that they are not like the Old Doc who moved to a small town to set up a practice, but stay in the big cities where their significant other has a career as well, so they have no support in place to tend thing domestic. Then rightfully, they take breaks to raise their kids which leads to a shortage nobody forecast. The number of grads look good in the stats, but the impact ain’t. The Specialists not so much, the General Practitioner is where the shortages are showing up. Now we are looking more closely at immigrant MD’s whose credentials are now being more closely examined and upgrading accelerated. The problem is worldwide made more so in poorer countries because the west is poaching people who should rightly stay and tend their own.