The Medical Specialties Which Will Have the Biggest Shortages in 2035

Pre-Med & Medical School
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https://www.beckersphysicianleadership.com/physician-workforce/the-physician-shortage-by-specialty-which-fields-will-face-the-biggest-gaps-by-2035/

  1. Thoracic surgery-- only 69% of projected need will be met. Long training period plus no expected surge in the pipeline planned.

  2. Ophthalmology-- only 70% of projected need will be met. Approx 550 ophthalmologists retire each year while only 450 graduate from residency each year.

  3. Plastic and reconstructive surgery-- 75% of projected need will be met

  4. Nephrology-- only 79% of projected need will be met

  5. Psychiatry–only 80% of projected need will be met, despite a steeply increased number of residency positions being offered. (More the 60% of currently practicing psychiatrists are over age 55 and are expected to retire in the next 10 years.)

  6. Primary care physicians (general internal medicine and family medicine) – AMCAS projects an annual shortage of 22,000-40,400 primary care physicians. The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) put the shortage at 440,000 by 2035. This shortage won’t be resolved even with an increase of 200 new residency positions/year over the next 10 years.

  7. All rural medicine – HRSA’s projections show that metro area will have about 95% of their primary care needs met while non-metro (small town and rural) locations will only have 42% of their primary care needs met. The shortages will be even more acute for surgical fields, including OB/GYN, general surgery and anesthesiology.

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Very interesting thx.

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Immigration/work visa policy will be hugely consequential here. Health care workers coming from other countries make up a significant portion of rural care providers.

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Do medical schools consider specialty interest for admissions? Do they consider the likelihood of a student going into rural medicine?

I just learned that a friend’s child graduated from medical school a few weeks ago and wants to go into rural medicine. The kids were raise on a ranch. They attended a very rural public high school (110 grads per class, 50% low income, 33% minority). Her twin does something in ranching with the father. Her mother was raised in South Dakota. Looking at her background, an admission office could infer that she’s more likely to return to rural areas than many other applicants who were raised in a city, went to an urban college, and have no connection to rural life. Just wondering if that is a consideration when anticipating a shortage of rural medicine doctors and hoping to fill those spots in the future. Or do med schools not care about what the needs are as of course ALL specialties will need doctors (there is just and overall shortage).

I know it doesn’t always work out that way. My daughter’s BIL also had a semi-rural background. Grew up in Indiana and Wyoming. Went to UWyoming, attended med school in Idaho, loved his internship in Montana. But he went into neurosurgery so it is unlikely he’ll be able to work in a rural area as he needs a big, modern hospital for his type of practice and the patients need to come to him, most likely in a city.

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No because most medical students change their minds several times (average is 3x) about their specialty preference during med school.

Some do.

However, there is no way to compel a student who says they’re interested in rural medicine to actually practice in rural area after residency. Things happen–like a spouse who needs a job that cannot be found in or near a rural location (like a university professor, research scientist or engineer, etc), or, like your daughter’s BIL who picked a specially that really can’t practiced in rural location. Also physicians typically care very strongly about the quality of the local schools and often end up relocating to more urban/more affluent areas once their children are old enough to start school.

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Yes, some do. For example there are 3 medical schools in Minnesota: The Mayo Clinic, The University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and the University of Minnesota Duluth. UMN-Duluth has a mission of producing rural doctors. They are very clear that they want students to have grown up in a rural area and to plan to return to a rural area. They are serious about this.

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Another example is Mercer University School of Medicine. “The School of Medicine educates physicians and health professionals to meet the primary care and health care needs of rural medically underserved areas of Georgia.”

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So does University of New Mexico SOM with its Rural and Urban Underserved Program. (RUUP)

Our beautiful state has many communities that need doctors. When applying to the University of New Mexico’s School of Medicine, many students speak of an interest in future medical practice in an area of the state – rural or urban – that is medically underserved. With 32 of New Mexico’s 33 counties considered medically-underserved, this program addresses a widespread need and is applicable throughout the state.

True story. In 2015 when the program was being implemented at the med school, it focused on rural medical underserved only and required every rising MS2 to spend 4 weeks interning with a rural healthcare physician in a medically underserved area. D2 was assigned to go to Taos during July and work in a family practice clinic there. However, she was diagnosed with cancer in late May, 2 weeks after her MS1 final exams. (She actually got the bad news while she was in Guatemala working at a rural women’s health clinic.)

Because she was undergoing weekly chemotherapy and targeted gene therapy, her oncologists were “uncomfortable” with her being 3-4 hours away from a major hospital in case of serious complication and strongly advised her not to go. She & her advisor appealed to the director of rural experience program and convinced her that there were plenty of urban medically underserved people living in Albuquerque (where her oncologists and the cancer center were located). D2 was allowed to switch her summer internship experience from Taos to ABQ where D2 worked in a family health clinic that served very low income/homeless Spanish-speaking mothers and their children in the rural-like North Valley area of ABQ.

So RUP became RUUP.

FWIW, in New Mexico, only Los Alamos County is not considered medically underserved. Bernalillo County which encompasses Albuquerque and its outlying suburbs, and where University of New Mexico with its med school, teaching hospital and cancer center are all located, is considered medically underserved. Santa Fe County where the state capital is located is also medically underserved.

D2 later did her senior rural medicine rotation (required of all medical students) with the Indian Health Service in Chinle, AZ. (Which is very rural and in the middle of the Navajo Reservation, not far from Canyon de Chelly.)

D1 did her 2 rural rotations both in Española, NM, in Rio Arriba County, Rio Arriba County is 3x the size of Delaware but has a population of 42,000. (For context, over 1M people live in Delaware.)

Both D1 and D2 expressed a strong interest in doing rural medicine, but life (and spouses whose careers could not be accommodated by a rural location) interfered.

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Thank you very much for posting this link. I have passed it on to my GD who is beginning her 2nd year of medical school. :slightly_smiling_face:

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