The medical school at the University of California, Irvine, has been upping enrollment for the past two years in a bid to offset a looming shortage of doctors in the next decade.
The school has been taking in more students since fall 2004, “the first class to increase the number of medical students since the 1970s,” said Thomas Cesario, the school’s longtime dean.
Two years ago, UC Irvine’s School of Medicine added 12 openings to its program, bringing its first-year class to 104 students.
In all, UCI has about 420 medical students.
The medical school was able to get University of Califor-nia officials to sign off on more students with a program to train doctors to practice in Latino areas, Cesario said.
The School of Medicine gets a lot of applicants, according to Cesario. The number’s been about 4,000 a year during the past couple of years, he said.
Unlike other UCI programs, the University of California controls medical school enrollment at the campus and at other UC schools, Cesario said.
“The number of physicians who graduate is very tightly regulated,” he said.
The limits were spurred by concerns about a doctor glut three decades ago, said Edward Salsberg, a vice president with the Association of American Medical Colleges in Washington, D.C.
“In the late 1970s, there was a concern that the nation was going to have too many doctors,” said Salsberg, who did a study about whether California needed more medical school students for UCI Chancellor Michael Drake back when he ran the University of California’s medical schools.
UC officials told medical schools to cut back their class size by 8% in the 1980s to prevent an oversupply of doctors, Cesario said.
Before the cuts, UCI medical school averaged about 100 students per class.
“We undergraduate in California significantly,” said Cesario, adding the state historically has imported doctors.
California ranks 20th at about 250 doctors per 100,000 people, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.
“The overall physician-to-population ratio is reasonable. It’s a little below the national average,” Salsberg said.
Salsberg’s group has called for boosting medical school enrollment.
Earlier this year, it said all medical schools should up students 30% by 2015 because of a predicted doctor shortage starting in 2016.
Coming Need
More doctors are needed because of the mass aging of the baby boom generation, the group said.
“Part of that reflects the relatively small medical school and graduate medical education sector in California,” Salsberg said.
Association figures show California at 39th out of 45 states with medical schools when it comes to the number of available slots for students.
Besides UCI, the University of California has medical schools in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and Davis, and there’s been talk of starting one at Riverside.
Cesario, who’s set to step down as head of UCI’s medical school in November, said the search for his successor “is well under way.”
A search committee has screened candidates, said Cesario, who plans to remain on the medical school faculty.
The replacement process now is in the middle of its second round of interviews, he said.
“I would imagine before too long, the search committee will make a recommendation to the chancellor, and he’ll start negotiating,” Cesario said.
Cesario has taught at UCI since 1972 and plans to work on developing international teaching and research programs in healthcare, he said.
