"The folks out there aren't all that happy with what is being spat out of our medical schools," Fitzhugh Mullan '64, director of the National Health Service Corps, said in a lecture last night.
A large part of the problem, Mullan told the audience of 95 students at Harvard Medical School, is that medical students aren't prepared to deal with the political issues of medical care delivery.
Two major deficiencies of American medicine are adequate access to doctors and the quality of medicine, Mullan said.
Mullan's agency, which sends 1,300 physicians into under-served areas was created because people were saying "we are paying a lot of money for medical education and we ain't getting any doctors, he said.
Mullan urged the students to consider a career in primary care, especially in underserved areas because "it offers greater flexibility over the long term than specialization."
Some of the problems in American medicine Mullan blamed on schools, which he said were geared to developing specialists.
"The role models you see are the heavyduty, high-powered academic types," Mullan said. "You don't see much of Old Doc Jones along Longwood Avenue," he added.
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