Josh Rusk isn’t like most medical students; he wants to study primary care.
“I learned that I didn’t want to do research, I wanted to help people,” Rusk said.
The number of medical students graduating in primary care, which includes family medicine, internal medicine and pediatrics, has dropped over the past 10 years. However, the U saw a rise in the number of medical students interested in primary care from 2007 to 2008.
Last year, 25 percent of U medical students specialized in primary care. The number increased this year to 32 percent, according to statistics from the U’s School of Medicine.
In fact, the number of medical students practicing primary care over the last year has increased nationally.
While it is still too early to call a trend, this is the first change in the downward spiral in a decade.
School of Medicine Dean David Bjorkman said we will have to wait and see if it becomes a trend in the next few years, or if it is just a hiccup on a graph.
“You have to look at the long term,” he said.
Bjorkman said medical students sometimes choose specialized fields such as radiology or dermatology over primary care because of the difference in lifestyle. They feel they are more in control of their schedules as specialists.
“In specialties, you get to pick the work hours you want,” Bjorkman said. Radiology specialists leave their work when they go home; whereas family doctors are occasionally paged after work hours to help a sick patient. Jeff Horn, a second year medical student at the U, has not yet decided what field to go into, but the demands of primary care and other professions that require doctors to be on call is affecting his decision process.
“I have to consider my family,” said Horn. “I want to be involved in my children’s lives.”
Lorris Betz, vice president of health sciences, said students are also swayed in their decision by the amount of debt they will have after graduation.
“Medical students graduate from the U with an average debt of $125,000,” Betz said. “A specialist’s salary is two to three times that of a primary care physician.”
Betz said the U medical school is trying to make more scholarships available to help students with debt.
“We are trying to find a way to reduce the debt,” he said.