EDITORIAL: Nevada needs better medical residencies, not just more of them

Building a new medical school at UNLV won’t be enough to improve Southern Nevada’s health care system. The valley’s acute physician shortage is a result of several factors, foremost among them a lack of residency programs and positions. Medical school graduates are more likely to practice where they complete their resident training.

But simply adding more residencies and specialties won’t lift the region’s quality of care or spur the growth of a medical research economy.

The sad truth is Nevada’s existing residency programs are nothing special. State health care professionals, education leaders and policymakers have known as much for years, because a majority of graduates of the University of Nevada School of Medicine and Henderson’s Touro University leave the state for their training and never return. Nevada has to fill many of its residency positions with graduates of international medical schools, which are easier to get into than U.S. schools.

A new report, issued this morning by physician network Doximity and U.S. News &World Report, confirms the overall low quality of Nevada’s residencies. The study is the first comprehensive national evaluation of the performance of almost 3,700 residency programs across 20 specialties.

None of the University of Nevada School of Medicine’s programs placed in the top 20 of any specialty, and the best-performing program was plastic surgery. Its programs rate among the bottom third in alumni who have authored peer-reviewed articles and alumni who subspecialize.

Compare those numbers with the top two medical residency programs in the country: the University of California, San Francisco, with three top-ranked specialties and 16 among the nation’s top 10, and Johns Hopkins University, with four top-ranked specialties and 14 among the nation’s top 10.

Last month, the Nevada Board of Regents sent Gov. Brian Sandoval a two-year funding request that includes almost $27 million in seed money for UNLV’s medical school and almost $10 million for improvements to graduate medical education. We support both initiatives, although UNLV’s medical school and residency programs should be supported by private funds as well.

But for that spending to pay off, regents, lawmakers and the governor must be committed not merely to opening a new medical school and adding more residency specialties and positions, but opening a great medical school and creating great residency positions.