By Kevin Smith
San Gabriel Valley Tribune
LOS ANGELES — California’s aging baby boomer population is threatening to overtax the state’s health care system, which doesn’t have enough doctors, nurses and other medical professionals to meet the demand.
That’s the assessment of the California Wellness Foundation and a host of other industry experts.
“As we look at the number of medical students ... basically we were educating the same number in 2003 that we were in 1970,” said David Hayes-Bautista, a professor of medicine and director of the Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
“The UC system put a new program in place to increase that number in 2004, but clearly we took our eye off the medical education ball.”
Hayes-Bautista attributes much of the current shortage to decisions that were made in the 1970s.
“There was concern that we had overbuilt our capacity in the 50s and 60s because we had built up medical schools at UC Davis, UC Irvine and UC San Diego - and the medical school at UCLA had come on line a decade earlier,” he said. “They thought there’d be a surplus of physicians and they’d end up driving taxi cabs.”
In 1982, a moratorium was enacted to further curb what many perceived as a glut of excess physicians.
“California looked at all the foreign graduates who had gone to medical school outside the U.S. but were coming here to do their residencies,” Hayes-Bautista said. “They thought that was adding to the physician surplus, so they closed the door in 1982.”
Now those decisions are coming home to roost.
“This is part of what we’re grappling with,” he said. “We solved the problem of a physician surplus, but the population of the state continued to grow - particularly the Latino population.”
Physicians aren’t the only ones in demand in California.
Recent figures from the state Employment Development Department reveal there’s a real need for a variety of other health care jobs as well.
In Los Angeles County alone, continued growth in the health care industry will necessitate the hiring of 713 new licensed vocational nurses per year, the agency reported.
Other jobs in high demand in L.A. County include registered nurses (2,481 additional nurses are needed each year); emergency medical technicians (113); nursing aides, orderlies and attendants (881); radiology technicians (144); and health care support workers (196).
On a nationwide level, the number of older adults is expected to nearly double between 2005 and 2030, and the nation is ill prepared to meet their social and medical needs, according to the Institute of Medicine.
The baby boomer generation will begin to turn 65 in 2011. And most older adults suffer from at least one chronic condition and have a far greater need for health care services than other segments of the population, the institute reported.
Linda Squires-Grohe, dean of the School of Health and Physical Education at City College of San Francisco, has led efforts to create, develop and expand 24 health-occupation programs that graduate more than 430 students per year.
“If you looked at the data from six months ago it indicated we’d have a nursing shortage by 2010, but we aren’t seeing those shortages yet because the economy is in a slump,” she said. “We were anticipating a lot of retirements, but people are postponing their retirements. They’re feeling insecure about things.”
Still, Squires-Grohe said many of her students are finding work in the Los Angeles and San Diego areas, indicating there’s a stronger need for medical personnel in those areas.