Medical students could graduate early
The University of Arizona College of Medicine — Phoenix will allow its fourth-year medical students to graduate early to start helping with the COVID-19 response.
In an email sent Friday, the school’s dean, Guy Reed, told fourth-year students they can request to graduate before the scheduled May 11 date. The school will review these requests on a case-by-case basis, and a committee will meet April 6 to consider each request, Reed said. The graduates could being working in a clinical setting as early as mid-April.
Students have to complete all graduation requirements and include in their request their rationale and planned service upon graduation.
“Given the extraordinary times in which we find ourselves, and the rapidly growing burden that the pandemic is placing on our health care system, we stand in admiration of our students who wish to pursue this option and will do our best to facilitate these requests,” Reed said.
About 50 students may qualify for the accelerated graduation, the school said.
Arizona doesn’t currently have a critical shortage of health care workers, Reed added, though that could change in the coming weeks.
The University of Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson also wants to allow its fourth-year medical students to graduate early, the school said Thursday.
During a telephonic town hall on Thursday, UA President Robert Robbins said the university is looking into plans for how it could “rapidly graduate” medical students.
Robbins said if they were to graduate early, students could enter the workforce for a few months between graduation and the start of their residencies to help with an immediate shortage of health-care workers. Graduation in Tucson currently is scheduled for May 14.
Dr. Michael M.I. Abecassis, the dean of the UA’s College of Medicine in Tucson, said the school is working with the UA College of Medicine-Phoenix to discuss these plans.
“We are working with our College of Medicine in Phoenix to come up with a plan over the next couple of days to do exactly that, to try to graduate our fourthyear students a few weeks earlier so that they can be available to help out, either on the front lines or in the background,” Abecassis said.
The discussion comes after New York University announced it would allow its fourth-year medical students to graduate early and begin working as interns sooner. So far, 69 of the school’s 122 eligible students have volunteered to do so, according to the Washington Post.
The Liaison Committee on Medical Education, the accrediting body for medical schools, put out guidelines on Wednesday for how schools can determine who is eligible to graduate early while complying with its standards.
UA’s Tucson medical school has an average class size of 115 students, the university has said. UA College of Medicine in Phoenix has a class size of 80, which will be increased later this year to 100 students after the college received additional funding from the state.
There’s a nationwide physician shortage. Data published in 2019 by the Association of American Medical Colleges projected a shortage of nearly 122,000 physicians by 2032.
UA’s Center for Rural Health said Arizona has a shortage of primary care physicians in every county, a problem that’s more acute in rural areas. The state is meeting just 42% of its needs for primary care providers, the center said.