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MICHIGAN STATE MEDICAL SOCIETY DECLARES STATE OF EMERGENCY IN DMC/WSU RESIDENCY TRAINING PROGRAMS IMPASSE

EAST LANSING –The Michigan State Medical Society (MSMS) today is declaring a state of emergency in Michigan regarding the current and future supply of physicians and their patients' ability to access the health care they need.

The emergency exists because of the impasse in contract negotiations between the Detroit Medical Center and the Wayne State University School of Medicine.

"The highest levels of political authority and moral authority must be immediately exercised to resolve this situation that affects the entire state of Michigan," said MSMS president Paul O. Farr, MD, a Grand Rapids gastroenterologist.

For more than a quarter of a century, WSU and the DMC have worked together to offer nearly 70 residency training programs to provide graduate medical education to young physicians who have completed medical school. This year, the DMC is objecting to the medical school's traditional partnerships with a dozen other health care institutions and the ability of WSU faculty physicians to offer clinical services to support the medical school's academic and access missions.

"This is not a test of wills or a political game to be played between a hospital administrator and a group of physician educators," Doctor Farr said. "This impasse has catastrophic implications for our whole state."

"These physician training programs have been and will continue to be critical to supplying our state with the high quality physicians we need in both urban and rural areas of our state," Doctor Farr said. "I cannot say it too strongly; health care in our state will be devastated without them."

All physicians who complete medical school also must complete a hospital-based residency training program for one to seven years, depending on specialty, before going into medical practice.

If the two sides cannot reach an agreement by December 31, it is possible that both the hospital and the medical school could lose approval by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) to offer the residency training programs. Without ACGME accreditation, the physician training programs would be defunct.

"A study by MSMS in 2005 shows that Michigan will have a deficit of 6,000 physicians by 2020 under the best of circumstances," Doctor Farr said. "I hate to imagine the access problems our patients will have if we lose the DMC/WSU training programs."

"The best way to attract a physician to a local community is to educate that physician in the state of Michigan," Doctor Farr said. "About 60 percent of Wayne's medical school graduates stay in Michigan. Nearly every county in Michigan has a Wayne State grad, and 16 counties have 200 or more."

Doctor Farr pointed out that WSU residents, under faculty physician supervision, provide 80 percent of the care for Medicaid patients and the working poor.

"Access would be devastated," Doctor Farr said. "Immediate patient care would be in shambles."

In addition to the loss of the health care access "safety net" of resident physicians to care for patients in the city of Detroit and the loss of future physicians across Michigan, also at stake in the contract negotiations is the ability to attract leading medical educators and researchers to the medical school, which currently is ranked among the top 20 percent of medical schools nationally.

Earlier this year, an orthopedic surgery residency training program between DMC and WSU was destroyed through a similar impasse and the young physicians were scattered to other programs in Michigan and across the United States. DMC retained the graduate medical education funding after the program's termination, rather than allowing the money to follow the residents to other orthopedic residency training programs. Michigan will suffer from the loss of these specialists.

"We hope the demise of the DMC/WSU orthopedic residency program is not an indication of things to come," Doctor Farr said. "In all of this, the greater good must be paramount, not just control by one institution."

All of the nearly 1,000 physicians-in-training in the DMC/WSU residency programs are members of the Michigan State Medical Society and Wayne County Medical Society of Southeast Michigan.

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