09/01/E ASAHI SHIMBUN2006　TH

10-year plan aims to solve doctor shortage in rural areas

Responding to a severe shortage of doctors in rural areas, the government is planning to temporarily increase the enrollment of students at medical schools in 10 prefectures, mostly in the northern Tohoku region, officials said Thursday. The 10-year program starting in fiscal 2008 will allow medical departments at private and public universities to bolster enrollment numbers by up to 10 students a year. While that may not seem like a lot, officials said that if all the medical schools raise enrollment numbers, hundreds more students will qualify each year to become doctors. The 10 prefectures are Aomori, Akita, Fukushima, Gifu, Iwate, Mie, Nagano, Niigata, Yamagata and Yamanashi. They were selected because they meet the criteria to increase enrollment--for example, they have fewer physician-to-population ratios for their areas. A condition for increased enrollment will be setting up scholarship programs to encourage medical students to work in the regions after graduation. Aside from providing more doctors for rural areas, the plan aims to increase the number of specialists in certain medical fields. The plan was drawn up by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications and the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Medical schools will be required to show where they will place students once they finish their education. In addition, the program will seek to raise enrollment at Jichi Medical University, which was set up in 1972 specifically to train doctors who want to work in rural areas. It will be able to beef up its annual enrollment by 10 students to total 110 as of fiscal 2008, for 10 years only. Government officials estimate Japan will have enough doctors in the long term. According to the health ministry, the number of doctors working at hospitals and clinics nationwide in 2022 will be around 305,000. In 1997, the Cabinet embarked on a policy to cut the enrollment of medical students so as to cut medical costs. But with a rapidly aging society, the government felt it had to reverse course because of severe doctor shortages in rural areas and in the fields of pediatric care and obstetrics, as well as other areas.

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