In a May 7 opinion piece (“We must solve Maine’s crisis of access to health care”), the author rightly articulates the frustration many Mainers experience around access to health care. Too many Maine people, especially in rural areas of our state, struggle to see a doctor or other health care provider.

As Maine’s largest educator of health care professionals, the University of New England takes these issues seriously.

Since 2012, UNE has more than tripled the number of nurses we train each year. Last year, we expanded the size of our dental school by eight students per year. Next year, we will add 35 additional medical students per year in UNE’s medical school, which means that we will soon have 800 students in training at any given time. We have several new health care programs under development, including programs to retrain foreign-born professionals so that they can practice in the U.S. And we emphasize team-based interprofessional care and rural health care in our teaching and in placing medical, dental and other health professions students in rural areas as part of their training.

Some of the author’s proposed solutions, such as public funding of incentive programs to attract and retain nurses and emphasizing rural health care, are spot on. But one of his ideas, starting another medical school in Maine, is misguided and in fact would only make matters worse.

Not only would starting another medical school in Maine be extremely expensive, doing so would not add more doctors to Maine’s workforce. This seems counterintuitive, but the simple fact is that Maine does not have a shortage of medical students; it has a shortage of clinical training and residency slots, which are the key to keeping those students in the state after they graduate.

Medical students spend their third and fourth years of medical school in clinical rotations. These are critical years during which students get hands-on training and start to envision where they may want to practice.

Each year, UNE must send over half of our third- and fourth-year medical students out of state to train due to insufficient slots in Maine clinics and hospitals. After graduating from medical school, doctors must complete four more years of clinical training in a residency program. Less than 32% of Maine’s new doctors can remain in Maine to complete residencies in primary care (family medicine, internal medicine, obstetrics, pediatrics and psychiatry – the very areas where we most need doctors), despite many of them wishing to do so.

Studies show that doctors tend to practice within 100 miles of where they completed their residencies, which means many of those recent medical school graduates who we must send out of state to complete their training do not come back.

If we want to keep more doctors in Maine, we must create more clinical training opportunities, both during student doctors’ time in medical school and for their residencies after they graduate. Addressing this shortfall will require both federal and state funding, and UNE is working diligently with partner health care systems to this end.

There is no doubt that Maine needs more health care professionals from various disciplines and better access to care. But if we are serious about addressing the problem, we must channel resources toward solutions that will actually have an effect.

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