Business health is part of the new facilities at the hospital. Many physicians graduating from family practice programs in Iowa are going into rural areas of the state to practice, says an education director. Nearly 75 percent of graduates who train in Iowa, stay in Iowa, and 60 percent of these are going to towns with populations of under 10,000, says Roger Tracy, director of the Statewide Clinical Education Program for the University of Iowa s College of Medicine. Communities with populations under 5,000 are getting the greatest number of new graduate doctors. The demand for physicians in urban and metro areas is decreasing due to fewer and fewer opportunities, and the supply of trained physicians, physician assistants, and nurse practitioners is rising, Tracy notes.
Rural communities have the greatest number of entering physicians.
The supply of doctors in towns under 5,000 is outstripping Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, Waterloo and other cities because the jobs are filled in the cities, where very few doctors are retiring or leaving, he says. In 1977, nearly 30 percent of the family physician population was over age 60, and in 1999, only 10 percent were over 60, says Tracy. That s important for rural medicine because family physicians are predominantly in rural areas. There was such a huge deficit when we began this training effort in 1970. It took 20 years to catch up with this problem, but we now have it well in hand.