Fishing for G.P.s

In the offices of each of 29 Binghamton, N.Y., general practitioners last week sat a high school student. As patients came in, the doctors asked them (provided that the situation would be neither embarrassing nor unethical) whether they would object to the student's staying. Most did not. During the week, 57 students from the town's four high schools spent a morning in a G.P.'s office, gulped lunch with the doctor, walked hospital corridors on visits to his patients, went home to dinner with him--and got a chance to observe how much his supposedly free time was interrupted by patients on the phone.

The occasion was a pilot demonstration of what the American Academy of General Practice calls Project MORE. The name, no acronym, reflects the academy's urge to recruit more premedical students and thus aid in the production of more doctors, especially G.P.s. Even sharper than the threat of an overall shortage of doctors in the U.S. is the growing scarcity of "family doctors," as more and more medical graduates go immediately into specialty training. The ratio of family doctors (including some specialists, notably internists, but mostly general practitioners) has dropped from one to 1,100 population in 1941 to one for an estimated 1,700 population today. This is the A.A.G.P.'s concern.

Its Binghamton branch, under the leadership of Dr. Raymond S. McKeeby, 49, a former flight surgeon, passed the word on Project MORE through the high schools, got hundreds of students to sign up for skull sessions on doctoring as a profession. From the most interested and promising, the doctors chose the 57 who went through last week's preceptorship program. From the Binghamton experience, and a similar pilot operation in Omaha, the A.A.G.P. will draw final plans for a nationwide Project MORE next year through all its 50 state chapters.

Said Dr. McKeeby: "We need direct, personal, one-to-one interest by the doctor in the student to stimulate young people to go into medicine. Then we must follow through. Medical school is a long pull, and a fellow needs a friend to guide and counsel him." A fellow also needs money. As a starter, the academy offered a $1,000 scholarship in Binghamton and another in Omaha.

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