Funds released to support medical training on Hawaii Island

HONOLULU—The University of Hawaii at Manoa’s John A. Burns School of Medicine will be receiving appropriated funds released by Gov. Linda Lingle to support the training of physicians on Hawaii Island.

“With the growing physician shortage we face in Hawaii, this is a crucial step forward,” said Dr. Jerris Hedges, dean of the UH medical school. “The effort to establish a residency training program on Hawaii Island has been an immense collaborative undertaking involving so many people in the community as well as in state, county and federal government.”

The state’s appropriation, which involves $140,000 for the next two years, is intended to go toward the start-up of a Hawaii Island residency training program under development. In that program, newly graduated medical doctors would spend three years undergoing specialty training in family practice under the direction of the medical school’s Department of Family Medicine and Community Health.

Once the program is formally established and provisionally accredited, which is expected within two years, the medical school believes that a combination of clinical revenue and federal training dollars, coupled with support from Hilo Medical Center, will serve to make the program sustainable. It hopes to graduate four family medicine specialists per year.

“This is so important because we know that eight out of ten physicians tend to open practices in the communities in which they complete their residency training,” said Dr. Hedges.

The outpatient component of the residency training program will be located at The Hawaii Island Family Health Center, which opened in April 2009 and treated 634 patients in its first year of operation. The multi-disciplinary clinic treats patients and employs health professionals from UH’s medical school and its training partners—UH Manoa’s School of Nursing and Dental Hygiene, UH Hilo’s School of Nursing and College of Pharmacy, and the Hilo Medical Center. 

Research funded by the Hawaii State Legislature, has established that, given its population, the state is at least 500 doctors below the national norm, and the gap may double or triple in the next decade as physicians near retirement. The shortage of primary and specialty care physicians has been especially critical on the neighbor islands in recent years.

On June 29, more than 100 leaders in health-care and public policy from all islands are meeting in Waikiki at the Hawaii Physician Workforce Summit to address the doctor shortage.