Sanders calls for expanded access to medical education to address worker shortage

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP), called to reduce barriers to medical education in a hearing on Thursday, bringing in medical school administrators from across the country to discuss their experiences and proposed solutions.

Lawmakers were largely in agreement in addressing the health care workforce shortage during the hearing on Thursday, with Sanders setting the tone.

“So here is my hope. My hope that we can do what the pundits tell us that we can’t do. And that is actually deal with the issues facing the American people in a serious, nonpartisan way. Because these issues impact every state in America,” Sanders said.

The Vermont senator noted that U.S. life expectancy has fallen in recent years and attributed part of this to lack of access to timely and convenient healthcare, with not enough health care providers available, particularly in rural areas.

Sanders focused his attentions on the problems medical students are facing before, during and after their time in school.

“It is a no-brainer to understand that when over 10,000 medical school graduates are unable to fill residency slots every year, we must significantly expand and improve the graduate medical program,” Sanders said, noting that related action fell outside the jurisdiction of the HELP committee but still merited its attention.

He further noted that steep medical debts disincentivize medical school graduates from going to rural areas where their pay could be lower, calling student loan forgiveness to be increased.

Medical school administrators told the committee of the issues they are seeing in maintaining a strong health care workforce.

Sarah Szanton, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, noted in her testimony that the nurse population in the U.S. is older, with the average age being 54 years old. She also said that nearly a fifth of nurses are 65 and older.

“There’s 4.5 million nurses, and nurses are often considered the oxygen of any health care setting. So as a country, we need people to become new nurses and we need to retain current nurses,” Szanton said.

She noted that many resources are needed for people to become nurses including getting into school, receiving the needed training and certification and graduating into careers that encourage worker retention. Tens of thousands of qualifying nursing school applicants are turned down, and Szanton cited lack of space as well as lack of scholarship funds.

“The nursing shortage is in large part a nurse faculty shortage. The country is shy about 2,100 nurse faculty,” said Szanton. “We need to increase the number of highly educated nurses who can be faculty and retain them by paying them as much as their clinical counterparts receive.”

Ranking member Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a physician himself, also touched on educational barriers in his opening remarks, noting that many experienced and accomplished nurses are unable to teach at nursing schools because they lack masters degrees, which are required to teach in some states.