Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges
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Comparative Study
Likelihood of contact with AIDS patients as a factor in medical students' residency selections.
Results from the National Resident Matching Program for the years 1980, 1983, and 1987 were used to examine changes over time in the matches of U. S. medical students to residencies in cities with high concentrations of patients with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and to specialties in which the care of AIDS patients was most concentrated. Medical students seeking postgraduate training in categorical surgery residency programs were less likely to be matched with programs located in areas where the numbers of reported AIDS cases were high in 1987 as compared with the "pre-AIDS" years of 1980 or 1983. ⋯ The authors discuss the implications for medical educators of declines in matches to specialties in which the care of AIDS patients is most concentrated. The imperfect nature of available measures of students' exposure to AIDS patients makes the data of this study preliminary, and further studies are being undertaken. However, the finding of significant effects in spite of the imprecision of some measures suggests that future work will confirm the results of this study.
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The Age Discrimination in Employment Act was amended in 1986 to remove age-determined mandatory retirement for nearly all employees. The present study was prompted by the concern that if medical school faculty failed to retire, there would be no positions available for new faculty. The author used 1984-85 data on both tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty of the five medical schools of the University of California (UC) to make projections, over 20 years, of faculty age distributions and available positions, at several possible growth rates and delays in retirement age. ⋯ S. medical school faculty in 1980 were used to show that the UC data were not exceptional. Acknowledging the various assumptions used in manipulating the data and the need to examine longitudinal data on faculty age, growth, turnover, and retirement to make more realistic projections, the author demonstrates that the impact of delaying retirement by several years would be minimal. Because of this conclusion and also the inevitable aging of the faculty resulting from the slowed growth of medical schools, academic institutions should pay more attention to maintaining the vitality and productivity of their individual faculty members, regardless of age.