Healthcare: Hofstra gets OKs to open medical school
By Gale Scott for Crain’s New York
Hostra University law students will soon be sharing dormitory space with aspiring doctors.
In a partnership with North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, the Long Island university has received necessary approvals from the state and from national accrediting organizations and is opening a medical school in 2011. The venture is calculated to enhance both institutions‘ prestige and plans for growth. But it will also fill a growing need for doctors due to an unanticipated physician shortage, one that has created a surge in medical school startups.
In addition to the Long Island school, Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine opened in Harlem in 2007, and in New Jersey, Rowan University near Camden will soon accept its first medical school class. Other schools have either already increased their class size or plan to soon expand.
One measure of need is the number of positions held by doctors who were trained in other countries.
“For 30 years, New York has been the biggest importer of doctors in the U.S.,” said Dr. Lawrence Smith, an internist and chief medical officer at North Shore-LIJ who will be the medical school’s first dean, “40% of the doctors practicing here [in New York] are foreign-trained.”
At the same time, Dr. Smith said, medical schools in the New York City metropolitan region and elsewhere have been turning away applicants. The nation has only 117 medical schools, producing about 18,000 graduates a year, while 26,000 positions for newly-minted doctors open annually in the form of medical residencies—post graduate programs that both train doctors in specialties and provide a needed labor pool for hospitals.
“We need to close that gap. There’s a richness to having doctors from all over the world work here, and we don’t’ want to lose that, but there’s also no reason we can’t train more of own sons and daughters who want to be doctors,” he said.
At the American Association of Medical Colleges, Edward Salsberg says the sudden dearth of doctors is due to a miscalculation made in the 1980s. “There was a major initiative in the 1960s to build medical schools, then in the 1980s we decided we’d overshot the target,” says Mr. Salsberg, who is director of the AAMC’s Center for Workforce Studies. But since then U.S. population has increased faster than anticipated, at the same time that Baby Boomers are hitting retirement age. “There are 100 million more Americans than there were in 1980, and people over 65 get twice as much medical care as the rest of the population,” he said. Adding to the shortage, health care reform is expected to increase the number of doctors needed, as more people will have access to routine care.
That’s all good news for the new university, says Dr. Smith, who says the first class will be 40 students, but will grow to 100 once everything is up and running.
Dr. Smith expects the first few classes to enter the new school will likely be local students who know both institutions, but that within a few years the pool of applicants will widen geographically.
And despite the growing cry for more primary care doctors, which is the focus of Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine, Dr. Smith says Long Island medical school will encourage students to specialize in many fields.
“We want our students to get really passionately excited about whatever they study, whether that’s primary care or surgery, or research,” he said.
At Hofstra University, President Stuart Rabinowitz says having medical school students—they will live in the law students’ dorm and study in a $12 million retro-fitted former New York Jets training facility in walking distance of the main campus—will lead to a stronger hard science program at Hofstra. The university is known more for law and liberal arts. Both institutions hope that will eventually mean the school will attract big name doctors and researchers, and ultimately more research grants.
Currently, the only uncertainty about the school’s future is its name. “We’re calling it ‘School of Medicine’ and we’re hoping to find a generous donor to give it a better one,” says Mr. Rabinowitz. “Bloomberg might be a nice name, for instance,” he said.
