“Like many military physician colleagues, Dr. Richard W. Thomas, a retired Army major general, ear-nose-throat surgeon and current president of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS), is worried about tentative Defense Department plans to eliminate more than 17,000 uniformed medical billets across the military health system starting in October 2020.”
“Thomas is sufficiently uneasy to discuss the proposed cuts publicly, in part because medical students at USUHS, aware that uniformed health care staffs could shrink as much as 13 percent over several years, are asking university faculty how the cuts will impact their careers and desired medical specialties…”
“Cuts of roughly 7,300 from Army medical staff and 5,300 apiece from the Navy and Air Force surfaced in draft reports. The intent is to repurpose billets as warfighters and to deepen individual workloads across military medicine so clinical skills stay sharp.”
“Those goals make sense, Thomas said. It’s the size of cuts that concerns him, particularly given the likely impact on graduate medical education pipelines, which he calls the “lifeblood” of military medicine. Graduate education produces specialists, from heart surgeons to primary-care physicians to pediatricians. The right mix ensures deployment readiness and proper staffing of base hospitals…” Read the full article here.
Source: Use Scalpel, Not Cleaver, on Medical Billets, USUHS Chief Urges – February 26, 2019. Military.com.
