On the roads and lanes of New Jersey signs of Dr. Patel, M.D., Dr. Chang, M.D., Dr. Singh, M.D., or Dr. Shah M.D., all medical doctors practicing internal medicine, or specialists in some areas of healthcare, are ubiquitous.
Patients hardly look at the last names of physicians, except occasionally when one wants to find comfort in a language that he or she can communicate with a doctor speaking in their native tongue.
But that’s all.
For patients, race or ethnicity of physicians do not generally matter — whether a doctor is from India, China, or Pakistan. This is New Jersey, the most diverse state in the United States of America.
A new report points to that diversity.
According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, a non-profit national group that tracks data about doctors, New Jersey tops the nation in the percentage of active physicians educated overseas, the highest number of foreign-educated doctors in the United States.
More than 38 percent of New Jersey’s 25,930 doctors went to medical school outside the U.S., according to the 2014 data, a report in N.J.com quoting the new study said.
The figure is more than double the percentage in most other states in America, including places like Montana and Idaho where patients hardly get a chance to run into a physician trained abroad.
The nearly 10,000 physicians in New Jersey, who went to medical schools overseas, including India, comprise mostly immigrants who trained in their home countries and relocated to the U.S. to practice medicine. Sometimes, relocation was difficult, but immigrants chose New Jersey, given an option, in preference to other states.
There are more reasons than one for that.
Longtime residents of New Jersey, say one of the reasons why immigrants with medical education abroad want to come to New Jersey is the state’s very diverse population where Indians live and work side by side with Chinese, Pakistanis, Europeans, and Hindus and Muslims.
“It’s a very homelike place for people of different ethnicities,” former Edison, N.J. City Council member Dr. Sudhanshu Prasad, told News India Times.
The new report also included among the foreign-trained doctors, U.S. citizens who got degrees offshore from medical schools in the Caribbean for instance, because their test scores could not get them entry into American medical schools. Prasad said New Jersey was attractive for them because, “Many New Jersey hospitals have arrangements with such foreign medical institutions where the students after completing their course successfully and as per American medical standards, can do the residency in the state,” Prasad said.
An earlier report by the Association of American Medical Colleges said that the United States will likely face a shortage of 50,000 to 100,000 physicians by 2025.
No wonder, Seton Hall University last year struck a deal with Hackensack University Health Network to open New Jersey’s newest medical school.
Atul Grover, chief public policy officer for the Association of American Medical Colleges, which compiled the data for its “2015 State Physician Workforce Data Book” said that the most obvious explanation is that states with high numbers of immigrants tend to be welcoming to foreign doctors, NJ.com reported.
“Wherever they come from, large numbers of foreign-educated doctors are finding jobs in New Jersey, New York (which ranks second in the nation with 37 percent of its physicians coming from foreign medical schools) and Florida (which ranks third with 36 percent), according to the ranking,” said Grover, adding, “Immigrants tend to move where they know people.” Although it might be difficult to assess whether doctors who attended foreign medical schools provide any better or worse care for patients in the U.S., Grover said, “But foreign graduates tend to do very, very well on those standardized tests.”
Only about 13 percent of New Jersey’s physicians, according to the NJ.com report are under age 40, which means that New Jersey could use some new doctors from the U.S. or abroad to replace the growing number of physicians expected to retire in the next few years.
“It is going to be worse in the states like New Jersey where the population (of older physicians) is higher,” said Grover.
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