STUDENT DOCTORS GO BEGGING FOR RESIDENCIES.

PositionYOUR LIFE

Each spring, students graduating from medical school look forward to the day they find out where they will be in residency, the next stage in their career as physicians, but nearly 2,000 of these individuals recently found out they will not be working as doctors, even though the Association of American Medical Colleges says a physician shortage is here and looms larger, expected to reach 121,000 by 2030.

"About six percent of U.S. medical school graduates do not move into residencies each year," says Kevin Lynn, founder of Doctors Without Jobs, Washington, D.C. "If you don't get a residency, you cannot be licensed to practice as a doctor. We cannot continue to ask our best and brightest to commit four years of their lives to higher education and another four years to specialized education in medicine--taking on hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt--and then say, 'Sorry, you can't work as a doctor.'

"There has to be greater awareness that we're not putting all of our doctors to work, and then the situation has to be remedied. We want to bring this to the attention of lawmakers, relevant governing bodies, and the general public."

The annual ritual of pairing current and prior year med school graduates with residencies is managed by the National Resident Matching Program. NRMP is a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization created in 1952 to place American medical school students into U.S. teaching hospitals' residency training programs, which are mostly taxpayer subsidized through Medicare funds.

In March, 44,600 doctors registered for the 2019 Main Residency...

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