Contents tagged with legislature

  • Texas residency slots not keeping up with medical school graduates

    Tags: report, legislature, medical school, residency, texas higher education coordinating board, graduate medical education

    Wednesday, April 25, 2012 12:53:08 PM
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    A new report reveals a severe problem in addressing the Texas physician workforce shortage: Though more medical students are graduating from Texas medical schools, our state won’t have enough first-year residency slots to keep them in the state to complete their training.

    The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board finds that while Texas medical schools have increased their enrollment by 31 percent from fall 2002 to fall 2011, at least 63 graduates will not be able to enter a Texas residency program in 2014. Without action, this shortfall will reach 180 by 2016.

    According to THECB and reported by the Texas Tribune, Texas had more than 550 residency programs in 2011 that offered a total of 6,788 residency slots. By 2014, Texas will need 220 more residency positions to achieve the 1.1 to 1 ratio of first-year residency positions to Texas medical school graduates. 

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  • McAllen family physician brings monument to Capitol grounds

    Tags: barrera, monument, legislature, community, capitol

    Monday, April 2, 2012 9:26:26 AM
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    After 12 years of planning, Texas leaders unveiled a Capitol grounds monument on March 29 honoring Tejanos, the first Spanish and Mexican descendants who introduced many of our state’s proud traditions and culture.

    This is el sueño (the dream) of McAllen family physician and TAFP member Cayetano E. Barrera III, M.D., as event emcee State Rep. Richard Peña Raymond said at the unveiling ceremony. Back in 2000, Barrera and his wife were walking the grounds of the Texas Capitol when they noticed that none of the statues or monuments recognized Hispanic contributions to the state. With his love of history and respect for genealogy, Barrera knew that the Tejano contribution was too important in the formation of Texas culture to ignore. And over the next decade, he worked as president of the Tejano Monument Committee to meet with sponsors, architects, engineers, historians, board members, legislators, and all other necessary contacts to raise support and funding for the monument.

    The final product is a grand tribute to the Tejano contribution. It features 11 life-size bronzed statues mounted on slabs of pink granite: a vaquero on horseback corralling two longhorns, a Tejano couple with a baby, a young girl, a boy leading a goat, and an explorer gazing over the whole scene.

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  • Addressing primary care access begins with the workforce

    Tags: workforce, legislature, budget, medical school

    Monday, February 20, 2012 1:00:40 PM
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    By now, it’s common knowledge that Texas faces a growing shortage of primary care physicians. We currently have approximately 18,000 primary care physicians to care for more than 25 million Texans, an unfavorable ratio that will worsen as fewer medical students choose to enter primary care fields and as the population continues to balloon at both ends of the age spectrum.

    In an op-ed published Feb. 10 in the Houston Chronicle, Sen. Jane Nelson, R-Flower Mound, wrote about this dire need to address primary care access in Texas, acknowledging that the non-emergency medical services and coordinated care primary care physicians provide for their patients has been shown to increase quality and efficiency, and lower costs.

    She has worked with TAFP and other stakeholders over the last decade to build the primary care workforce to improve the health of Texans and make health care costs sustainable for our state, and last session authored a comprehensive package of reforms to the state’s health care delivery system that aims to improve quality and efficiency in the health delivery system by testing and implementing various performance-based payment methods that provide incentives for improved patient outcomes.

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