Thursday, Jan 6 2011 4:38PM
More than half of Mendocino doctors will soon hit retirement, emphasizing the need for more doctors in the area.
Rural California is suffering from a severe lack of physicians, who many believe are unwilling to relocate to some of the state's most sparse areas, reported the San Francisco Chronicle.
In places like Ukiah, located in Mendocino county, the shortage of doctors is so bad that the local medical community hopes to put a greater reliance on nurse practitioners and medical assistants, to aid the community's handful of doctors with their overwhelming amount of patients.
"It's beautiful here, but [for] somebody new coming out of medical school, this is kind of like no man's land," Cathy Frey, the executive director of the Alliance for Rural Community Health in Ukiah, told the Chronicle. She added that the area's lower-income patient base may also deter recent graduates who are concerned about paying off their student loans.
The need to recruit new doctors and medical school graduates is extreme, as the newspaper said more than half of the doctors in Mendocino country are older than 55 and will soon hit retirement.
The state is taking some steps to help address the growing problem and provide for rural community development. In 2007, the University of California-Davis Medical School initiated a program called Rural Programs in Medical Education, which aims to prepare doctors for careers in outlying and underprivileged communities.