Oklahoma Delegation Leads Effort To Help Doctors Practice In States With Shortages

Members of the Oklahoma congressional delegation are leading a bipartisan effort to reauthorize a program to help get more young doctors to practice in states with significant physician shortages.

Congressman Tom Cole (R-OK4) and Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) joined Senator Jacky Rosen (D-NV) and Congresswoman Dina Titus (D-NV) last week in reintroducing the bipartisan, bicameral Medical Student Education Authorization Act, to authorize the Medical Student Education (MSE) Program through fiscal year 2025.

The MSE Program provides grants to public institutions of higher education to expand or support graduate education for physicians in states with the most severe primary care provider shortages.

Oklahoma currently ranks 48 in the nation in physician to population ratio, with about 1 doctor for every 477 citizens. One of the factors contributing to the shortage is a shortage of residency slots.

"We know that of medical students who do their residency in the state, over 50 percent -- close to 60 to 70 percent -- will stay within the state," said Dr. Diane Heaton, a Tulsa-area radiation oncologist who is currently president of the Oklahoma State Medical Association. "We currently are seeing medical students not being able to do residency and that’s just a devastating situation."

Dr. Heaton said this year close to ten percent of students graduating from Oklahoma medical schools did not match with their in-state choice for residency, sending them scrambling to find slots out of state.

"And once they’re gone and they’ve settled in another area, we may as well have lost them," said Dr. Heaton in an interview Monday. "These were Oklahoma students who were fostered and supported from grade school on, and to think that we’re going to lose them at the last moment is just harmful for our state."

Rep. Cole and Sen. Mullin are both optimistic the MSE program, if it is reauthorized, will improve the situation. Cole, who along with then-Senator Jim Inhofe helped create the program in 2019, said there are already signs it's working.

"One key indicator of the program’s current success in tribal communities," said Cole in a statement last week, "is the fact that nearly half of medical students self-identifying as Native American are enrolled in a medical school participating in this program."

Doctor Heaton acknowledges residency slots are expensive -- the residents still need educational support and they get paid a salary. She said the hospital she works out of, Hillcrest Hospital, had hoped to add twenty residency slots in surgery, vascular surgery and primary medicine this year, but couldn't, due to lack of funding.

Heaton is grateful to the Oklahoma and Nevada members who introduced the legislation and urges all to support its passage.

"Absolutely, I can’t think of any better use for our dollars," Heaton said."We’re all getting older and we need young physicians to care for the health of our population."