SAN FRANCISCO — Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) are presenting solutions to a potential upcoming shortage in health care providers.
By the year 2025, UCSF officials estimate that there will be a shortage of 52,000 primary care physicians in the United States. In a series of papers published in Health Affairs, doctors and administrators of UCSF offered potential solutions to close that shortage.
Dr. Thomas Bodenheimer, UCSF professor of family and community medicine, and Dr. Mark Smith, president and CEO of the California HealthCare Foundation, suggest that simply hiring more physicians will not be possible.
“The traditional solution to a shortage of physicians has been to mint more,” Smith said in a statement. “But that won’t close the gap because demand is too strong and too few medical students are choosing primary care.”
To meet this pending shortage, health care providers should empower licensed and unlicensed health care personnel to expand their scope of care, according to Smith and Bodenheimer. Patients should also increase their participation in providing their own care.
The doctors suggest that registered nurses should have the ability to provide for “uncomplicated” medical problems such as respiratory and urinary tract infections, lower back pain, diabetes and high blood pressure. Unlicensed medical assistants should address preventative care needs and patient coaching for chronic conditions. Additionally, diagnostic technologies should be used to permit patients to perform self-diagnosis and administer their own medications for chronic conditions.
“These recommendations are all evidence-based,” Bodenheimer said in a statement. “Research indicates that these approaches not only work, but actually tend to increase patient satisfaction compared with care by physicians.”
Catherine Dower, health policy and law director of the UCSF Center for the Health Professions, authored another paper supporting the recommendations of Bodenheimer and Smith. Current licensing laws are archaic and prevent many health care professionals from offering services that they are qualified to provide, Dower said.
“The health professions regulatory system in the U.S. includes outdated laws and regulations, is not standard across states and is too often guided by politics rather than evidence,” Dower said in a statement.
Ultimately, the stern regulations imposed upon health care professionals are a disservice to patients and result in higher health care costs, Dower said.
“Old ways of regulating health care professionals result in unnecessary restrictions, limited choices and higher costs,” Dower said. “We are restricting the full use of a workforce whose education and training is subsidized by public dollars.”
