From the way back archive we bring you this story from the Kitsap Sun quoting the then Assistant Secretary of Defense Health Affairs, Dr. Edward Martin regarding a plan to eliminate General Medical Officers:
The Defense Department has ordered the services to stop recruiting under-trained doctors and sending them to isolated billets where their performance can't be checked.
The physicians in question are called General Medical Officers. Roughly 1,500 GMOs now are on active duty, mostly in the Navy and Air Force. They serve primarily on ships, with Fleet Marine Force units or as flight surgeons.
GMOs are medical school graduates who spend only a year as interns before being shipped to an operational billet.
Defense officials have given the services four years to stop recruiting GMOs. Those already in service can stay for full careers, but some might see their assignment choices narrowed as the services tighten standards on patient care.
Most GMOs will be given a chance to complete two or three more years of graduate medical education to become fully qualified specialists in areas such as family practice, pediatrics, internal medicine, emergency medicine and occupational medicine.
Dr. Edward Martin, acting assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, said the military can no longer risk having undertrained doctors provide unsupervised care.
""The judgment is that (the GMO program) might have worked 10 or 20 years ago, but today they're not adequately trained to provide care, particularly to isolated duty,"" Martin said.
Service officials have worried for years about GMOs qualifications but have been slow to act. The Navy, asked by Defense recently to develop a four-year phaseout plan, provided a 10-year plan instead, said a Defense official.
Comment: The story was written in 1998 but 12 years later in 2010 GMOs are still a key component of the DoD's medical department especially in Navy medicine. From time to time over the past decade word has gone out that the GMO positions will be eliminated however they always persist. The critics argue that service members and their families deserve care from residency trained physicians and that non-residency trained physicians aren't eligible for a medical license in many states. The GMO tours are considered a retention killer by many as young med students lured by the military medicine recruiters promises of "your choice of specialty training" find themselves pushed into GMO tours with little or no opportunity for post-internship graduate medical education. The proponents say GMO tours are an opportunity for professional growth, that fully trained physicians would be underutilized and experience clinical skill atrophy in most operational billets and that the practice results in cost savings. There has been some discussion of replacing GMOs with "physician extenders" however most require close supervision from a physician. Where do you stand regarding the military's use of GMOs and will this still be an issue in the decades to come?