General Discussion

The primary care givers are either Nurse Practitioners or physician assistants. In good hospitals, this has worked well and alleviated the pressure on physicians. But in many cases, it’s just a way to have fewer high paid physicians. Having been on the admissions committee of a top US medical school, and the Director of Admissions for one of the largest graduate programs in that school, what I have seen is that the selection process for years has been based on grades, standardized tests, boxes checked, and not on an applicant’s desire or real ability to do what they are being trained for. As Director of Admissions for the graduate program, I was able to change that such that we were selecting people based on real research experience and potential, rather than meaningless test scores. And the result of those changes was the average time to graduation decreased from almost 8 years to a little over 4 years. Unfortunately, similar changes have yet to be made in the selection process for most medical schools.