Rosemary Stevens

Medical Practice in Modern England : The Impact of Specialization and State Medicine

Before World War II, the great majority of practicing doctors in England and Wales were general practitioners. They performed their own surgery, and were accustomed to treating a wide variety of illnesses and symptoms. Specialists were few in number, tended to practice in large towns, and were often associated with major hospitals. But rapidly changing medical institutions and services in the twentieth century have compelled specialization even among more modest doctors and hospitals.

Licensure, competence, and manpower distribution. A follow-up study of foreign medical graduates.

Medical statistics report United States medical graduates licensed at higher rates than foreign medical graduates. This difference is often interpreted to show greater medical competence of United States graduates. This study questions this interpretation by analyzing 1971 licensure rates for both groups who had been interns and residents in 1963. We found that factors unrelated to competence--namely, visa-citizenship status and state of examination--are associated with holding a license. Moreover, quality of medical education is not an accurate predictor of licensure. It follows that the use of licensure rates as measures of medical competence distorts understanding of the quality of medical care in the United States. More probably, the difficulties in obtaining medical licensure experienced by foreign graduates result from the use of such graduates to relieve specific medical-manpower shortages.

United States foreign medical graduates in Connecticut: how they compare with foreign medical graduates.

This study contrasts the graduate training and subsequent careers of a cohort of United States-born foreign medical graduates (USFMGs) and foreign medical graduates (FMGs) who were in training positions in Connecticut in 1964 and who were located in 1971. The data suggest that although USFMGs were foreign-educated, they had certain advantages—both cultural and administrative—in hospital training positions which helped them to pursue different career alternatives than FMGs. However, the data further suggest that they retained characteristics of their foreign training which continued to differentiate them from United States medical graduates (USMGs).

Welfare Medicine in America: A Case Study of Medicaid.

The present study was undertaken for three reasons: Medicaid is a vital program - in the early 1970s it provided care for over one tenth of the American population. It is a huge program - in the same period it consumed over nine billion dollars of public funds. And Medicaid is, in many ways, the most direct involvement with the provision of medical care undertaken by either the federal government or the states. But up until the publication of this book, Medicaid had not been studied in depth or in a systematic way.