Curriculum Change Needed at Yale

The United States Congress has recently passed an important bill entitled, The Health Professionals Assistance Act of 1976. It seeks to right physician maldistribution in the country and curtail the over specialization of medical practitioners. Quotas have been set in terms of the number of medical school graduates who must enter primary care training programs over the next few years. Failure to comply risks loss of the federal capitation grant of twenty-one hundred dollars per student or about one million dollars a year in Yale's case.The causes of physician maldistribution are discussed. Partial blame is ascribed to the medical schools themselves and recommendations are made for curriculum changes which if adopted may achieve better physician distribution without further government inroads into medical school affairs.