In honor of National Caregivers Month this November, the VA Palo Alto, CA, Health Care System, held events for friends and family who provide care to ill, injured or disabled veterans. VA photo WASHINGTON — The military services need to develop “targeted and coordinated strategies” to alleviate military physician gaps, a recent report recommended.
The recommendation was included in a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report entitled, “Additional Actions Needed to Address Gaps in Military Physician Specialties.” The report reviewed DoD’s recruitment, accession, and retention of health care professionals.
“Despite the services’ success in recruiting medical students, their current approach in the use of their programs is not fully addressing critical military physician gaps, in part because the services do not have targeted and coordinated strategies for reducing gaps,” the report explained.
Until DoD is able to fill gaps in critical specialties, it “may be hindered” in its ability to provide medical support for its troops during wartime, the review suggested.
“Military physicians are essential to maintaining DoD’s capability to deliver health care services to servicemembers and other DoD beneficiaries, but various factors, including national shortages in certain physician specialties and competition with the private sector, make it difficult for DoD to recruit and retain fully qualified physicians,” the GAO noted.
The report explained that, despite the use of the Armed Forces Health Professions Scholarship Program (AFHPSP), the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS) and other programs and incentives to recruit and retain physicians, gaps continue to exist in critical specialties.
While the Navy exceeded its overall physician authorizations in fiscal years 2011 through 2015, the Army, Air Force and all of the five reserve components were below their overall physician authorizations, the report pointed out.
Examples included the persistent shortfalls in critical care and trauma medicine among Navy and Air Force medical services. The Army reported shortfalls, meanwhile, in neurological surgery and nuclear medicine.
At the same time, the military services have not developed strategies for “mitigating military GME program limitations in order to more fully leverage the program in addressing gaps in some physician specialties,” the report stated.
Another challenge is that the services have not developed metrics to measure how effective their recruitment, training and retention programs are in addressing gaps.
Recommendations included that the services track complete, accurate, and accessible information on the qualifications, performance, and progress of AFHPSP medical students and that USUHS should track complete, accurate, and accessible information on the performance and progress of USUHS medical students. DoD did not provide comments on the recommendations.