Educational debt, specialty choices, and practice intentions of underrepresented-minority medical school graduates

Effect of medical student debt on mental health, academic performance and specialty choice: a systematic review

OBJECTIVES

With the high and rising total cost of medical school, medical student debt is an increasing concern for medical students and graduates, with significant potential to impact the well-being of physicians and their patients. We hypothesised that medical student debt levels would be negatively correlated with mental health and academic performance, and would influence career direction (ie, medical specialty choice).

DESIGN

We performed a systematic literature review to identify articles that assessed associations between medical student mental health, academic performance, specialty choice and debt. The databases PubMed, Medline, Embase, Scopus and PsycINFO were searched on 12 April 2017, for combinations of the medical subject headings Medical Student and Debt as search terms. Updates were incorporated on 24 April 2019.

RESULTS

678 articles were identified, of which 52 met the inclusion criteria after being reviewed in full text. The majority of studies were conducted in the USA with some from Canada, New Zealand, Scotland and Australia. The most heavily researched aspect was the association between medical student debt and specialty choice, with the majority of studies finding that medical student debt was associated with pursuit of higher paying specialties. In addition, reported levels of financial stress were high among medical students, and correlated with debt. Finally, debt was also shown to be associated with poorer academic performance.

CONCLUSIONS

Medical student debt levels are negatively associated with mental well-being and academic outcomes, and high debt is likely to drive students towards choosing higher paying specialties. Additional prospective studies may be warranted, to better understand how educational debt loads are affecting the well-being, career preparation and career choices of physicians-in-training, which may in turn impact the quality of care provided to their current and future patients.

New Century Scholars: A Mentorship Program to Increase Workforce Diversity in Academic Pediatrics

This article describes a program aimed to increase workforce diversity and underrepresented minority (URM) representation in academic pediatric medicine. The New Century Scholars (NCScholars) program is a core program in the Academic Pediatric Association, the largest national organization for academic pediatric generalists. The program selects URM pediatric (or medicine-pediatrics) residents who are interested in academic careers and provides each NCScholar with a junior and senior mentor, as well as travel grants to the Pediatric Academic Societies annual meeting where activities specific to the program are held, and provides ongoing mentorship and career counseling support.The authors discuss the origination, operation, and changes to the program over the first 10 years of its existence, as well as outcome data for the participants in the program. To date, 60 of the 63 NCScholars have finished residency and/or have made postresidency plans, and 38 of these URM pediatricians (63%) have entered academic careers. The authors suggest that this type of mentorship program for URM pediatric trainees can be used as a model for other specialties and medical organizations.

Educational debt and reported career plans among internal medicine residents

BACKGROUND

Physicians often enter the workplace with substantial debt. The relationship between debt and reported career plans among internal medicine residents is unknown.

OBJECTIVE

To determine distributions of educational debt among internal medicine residents and associations of debt with reported career plans.

DESIGN

Cross-sectional survey using data from the annual Internal Medicine In-Training Examination Residents Questionnaire completed by U.S. categorical internal medicine residents.

SETTING

Categorical internal medicine residencies in the United States.

PARTICIPANTS

22,563 residents in their third (final) year of residency, representing 74.1% of all eligible U.S. categorical internal medicine residents from 2003 through 2007.

MEASUREMENTS

Distributions of educational debt were tabulated. Proportions of residents choosing career plans were calculated for various levels of debt.

RESULTS

International medical graduates represented 48.7% of the cross section and had considerably less debt than U.S. medical graduates: 53.8% of U.S. medical graduates had debt of 100,000 dollars or greater and 60.2% of international medical graduates had none. U.S. medical graduates with debt of 100,000 dollars to 150,000 dollars were less likely than those with no debt to choose a subspecialty career (57.5% vs. 63.5%). U.S. medical graduates with debt of 50,000 dollars to 99,999 dollars were more likely than those with no debt to choose a hospitalist career (8.5% vs. 6.2%), and this preference increased with increasing debt level (10.0% for those with >150,000 dollars debt). These associations are more pronounced for U.S. medical graduates than for international medical graduates.

LIMITATION

The study addressed total educational debt, but not when it was incurred, and did not allow inferences related to causality.

CONCLUSION

Educational debt is associated with differences in reported career plans among internal medicine residents.

Viewpoint: Developing a physician workforce for America's disadvantaged

Eliminating health disparities will be difficult as long as many rural and disadvantaged inner-city communities remain medically underserved. The authors argue that the current debate on physician workforce policy has not adequately emphasized medical schools' social mission to educate physicians who will improve health care access and equity; fulfilling that mission means training students who will deliver primary care to underserved people. But fewer medical students are entering primary care specialties and practicing in underserved areas, and students who have the characteristics that make them likely to select such careers are increasingly uncommon among medical school matriculants. Unless there is a dramatic change, the imbalance will only become worse. The authors argue that the epidemiology of medical student career choice is sufficiently understood to permit schools to accept applicants with those characteristics, both demographic and individual, that are known to increase the probability of students caring for populations in need after graduation. Programs that have selected students on the basis of those predictors have been successful in increasing the distribution of doctors to primary care specialties and underserved areas, but these have not been of sufficient scope. The authors present a proposal for prioritizing medical school admissions to favor applicants who, rather than delivering just high grades, will contribute to improving America's health care outcomes.

Impact of the University of California, Los Angeles/Charles R. Drew University Medical Education Program on medical students' intentions to practice in underserved areas

PURPOSE

To estimate the impact of a U.S. inner-city medical education program on medical school graduates' intentions to practice in underserved communities.

METHOD

The authors conducted an analysis of secondary data on 1,088 medical students who graduated from either the joint University of California, Los Angeles/Charles R. Drew University Medical Education Program (UCLA/Drew) or the UCLA School of Medicine between 1996 and 2002. Intention to practice in underserved communities was measured using students' responses to questionnaires administered at matriculation and graduation for program improvement by the Association of American Medical Colleges. Multivariate logistic regression analysis was used to compare the odds of intending to practice in underserved communities among UCLA/Drew students with those of their counterparts in the UCLA School of Medicine.

RESULTS

Compared with students in the UCLA School of Medicine, UCLA/Drew students had greater adjusted odds of reporting intention to work in underserved communities at graduation, greater odds of maintaining or increasing such intentions between matriculation and graduation, and lower odds of decreased intention to work in underserved communities between matriculation and graduation.

CONCLUSIONS

Training in the UCLA/Drew program was independently associated with intention to practice medicine in underserved communities, suggesting that a medical education program can have a positive effect on students' goals to practice in underserved areas.

A follow-up study of the characteristics of dean's letters

PURPOSE

To assess the content and quality of dean's letters since the publication of guidelines recommended by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) in 1989.

METHOD

In 1998, the dean's letter writers at all 124 U.S. medical schools were surveyed. The questionnaire incorporated items from two previous surveys (1981 and 1992). In addition, samples of dean's letters (n = 451) from all U.S. medical schools for the graduating class of 1998 were rated based on the AAMC's guidelines.

RESULTS

The response rate of the 1998 survey (66%) was lower than those of the two previous surveys (87% for 1992 and 85% for 1981). Schools that prepared letters that followed the AAMC's guidelines were somewhat more likely to have responded. According to the letter writers in 1998, close to 300,000 letters (approximately 1,050,000 pages total) were sent to residency directors, at an estimated cost of $26,000 per school. A total of 65% of schools produced adequate dean's letters based on the 1989 AAMC's guidelines, compared with 55% in 1992. Many schools were organizing the dean's letter in more readable formats, and more schools provided information that allowed for a comparison of students within the same school.

CONCLUSION

The improvements in dean's letters are encouraging, but ten years after the AAMC's guidelines, 35% of U.S. schools still produce unacceptable letters. With the addition of the electronic submission of information, it is time to review further improvements to the dean's letter.

Medical training debt and service commitments: the rural consequences

This study assesses how student loan debt and scholarships, loan repayment and related programs with service requirements influence the incomes young physicians seek and attain, influence whether they choose to work in rural practice settings and affect the number of Medicaid-covered and uninsured patients they see. Data are from a 1999 mail survey of a national probability sample of 468 practicing family physicians, general internists and pediatricians who graduated from U.S. medical schools in 1988 and 1992. A majority of these generalist physicians recalled "moderate" or "great" concern for their financial situations before, during and after their training. Eighty percent financed all or part of their training with loans, and one-quarter received support from federal, state or community-sponsored scholarship, loan repayment and similar programs with service obligations. In their first job after residency, family physicians and pediatricians with greater debt reported caring for more patients insured under Medicaid and uninsured than did those with less debt. For no specialty was debt associated with physicians' income or likelihood of working in a rural area. Physicians serving commitments in exchange for training cost support, compared to those without obligations, were more likely to work in rural areas (33 vs. 7 percent, respectively, p < 0.001) and provided care to more Medicaid-covered and uninsured patients (53 vs. 29 percent, p < 0.001), but did not differ in their incomes ($99,600 vs. $93,800, p = 0.11). Thus, among physicians who train as generalists, the high costs of medical education appear to promote, not harm, national physician work force goals by prompting participation in service-requiring financial support programs and perhaps through increasing student borrowing. These positive outcomes for generalists should be weighed against other known and suspected negative consequences of the high costs of training, such as discouraging some poor students from medical careers altogether and perhaps influencing some medical students with high debt not to pursue primary care careers.

Specialty choices, compensation, and career satisfaction of underrepresented minority faculty in academic medicine

PURPOSE

Despite efforts to increase the numbers of underrepresented minorities (URMs), only 3.9% of medical school faculty are URMs. The authors compared the specialty choices, compensation, and career satisfaction of minority faculty with those of their majority counterparts to determine whether there were differences that might affect the recruitment and retention of minority faculty.

METHOD

In 1995, the authors mailed a self-administered survey to a stratified random sample of 3,013 eligible full-time salaried faculty in 24 randomly selected medical schools. Those schools, which had at least 200 faculty, did not include the Puerto Rican or historically black medical schools.

RESULTS

Of the eligible faculty surveyed, 1,807 (60%) responded; 1,463 were majority faculty, 195 were URM faculty, and 149 were other-minority faculty. Similar proportions of the three groups were in the primary care specialties. Only 11% of the URM respondents were in basic science departments. There was no significant difference in adjusted mean compensation between majority, URM, and other-minority faculty. However, URM faculty were significantly less satisfied with their careers (adjusted scores: 60 versus > 65; p = .001) and more often considered leaving academic medicine within five years (58% versus < 45%).

CONCLUSION

Given the demographic changes of the U.S. population, these issues should be addressed by deans and department heads in order to enhance recruitment and facilitate retention of URM faculty in academic medicine.

The relationship between the race/ethnicity of generalist physicians and their care for underserved populations

OBJECTIVES

The purpose of this study was to examine empirically the relationship between physicians' race or ethnicity and their care for medically underserved populations.

METHODS

Generalist physicians who received the MD degree in 1983 or 1984 (n = 1581) were surveyed. The personal and background characteristics of four racial/ethnic groups of physicians were compared with the characteristics of their patients.

RESULTS

When the potentially confounding variables of gender, childhood family income, childhood residence, and National Health Services Corps financial aid obligations were controlled, generalist physicians from underrepresented minorities were more likely than their nonminority counterparts to care for medically underserved populations.

CONCLUSIONS

Physicians from underrepresented minorities are more likely than others to care for medically underserved populations.