Doctors are avoiding work in Utah, and researchers think this controversial policy is driving the trend (2024)

“State governments and health care leaders need to consider the potential impact of those [policy] decisions on the physician workforce,” the health care think tank wrote in their report.

The number of new medical school graduates applying to Utah residency programs dropped by nearly a thousand this year, continuing a trend of health care professionals choosing to work elsewhere — a trend that will likely have impacts on patients already enduring long wait times to see a doctor.

Utah was among the states with the biggest drops in applicants, according to an analysis by the Association of American Medical Colleges’ think tank, which documented a wide range of shifts — from a decrease of 19.3% to an increase of 30.3%. The applicants considering the Beehive State went down by 13.1%, and the average state saw a 10.1% decline.

Researchers noticed a pattern among the states experiencing the most severe losses in applicants: They had adopted restrictive abortion policies.

Utah is one of five states categorized as “very restrictive” by the Guttmacher Institute, which researches sexual and reproductive health policy. The state has a gestational limit on when someone can access an abortion — it currently is legal up to 18 weeks.

But Utah’s highest court is weighing whether a near-total ban triggered by the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2022 overturn of Roe v. Wade will remain blocked.

If the courts determine that law is allowed under the Utah Constitution, abortion would be barred except in cases when the mother’s health is at risk or the fetus has a fatal abnormality. Survivors of rape or incest would only be allowed to access abortion up to 15 weeks.

In the year following the Dobbs decision, the medical school graduates applying to come to Utah dropped by 408. That number fell again by 992 this year.

“Continued disproportionate decreases in the number of applicants to programs in states with limits or restrictions were observed across all [medical] specialties in aggregate,” the AAMC report said.

Researchers added, “Because these policy decisions appear to affect where physicians plan to practice, state governments and health care leaders need to consider the potential impact of those decisions on the physician workforce.”

Utah medical professionals have for years been warning that imposing penalties on health care providers for performing abortions would dissuade them from working in the state.

“We’ve seen people who have had dramatic and unfortunate outcomes earlier in pregnancy due to lack of access locally and in surrounding states,” said David Turok, a professor in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Utah, in front of the Utah Legislature’s Health and Human Services Interim Committee last August.

He continued, “So this is a major connector and driver for our ability to recruit and retain workforce for the future, and we’ve already seen it in applications locally and nationally for medical training, especially for OB-GYNs.”

Republican lawmakers on the committee pushed back against Turok’s remarks. West Jordan Republican Rep. Ken Ivory, who co-chaired the committee, asked, “With respect to your last comments, I’m just curious, are you advocating that we ignore or violate state law?”

In an October interview with The Salt Lake Tribune, Ogden Democrat Rep. Rosemary Lesser said she worries about abortion policies’ wider impacts on health care in the Beehive State.

“I really do fear for Utah’s ability to attract doctors, when, in this competitive world of medicine, they can go [practice at a hospital] where legislative bodies respect their judgment and the judgment of their patients,” Lesser said, adding, “There will be delay in getting care, because if you have limited numbers of providers, and the same number of patients, which we know from our Utah population going up, that will be, I think, a real catastrophe.”

A study published in the journal Human Resources for Health in 2020, prior to the Dobbs decision, estimated that by 2030 Utah would have a shortage of 1,418 physicians.

AAMC either did not have a sufficient sample size or enough data to determine which specialties were seeing the biggest losses in Utah residency applicants.

An OB-GYN and complex family planning fellow at the University of Utah, Alex Woodco*ck, found in surveys conducted after the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that OB-GYN residents were avoiding jobs in abortion-restrictive states like Utah.

Of the more than 300 residents across the country who responded to her survey, nearly 1-in-5 said they had altered their intended practice state following the Dobbs decision, and those who initially planned to practice in states that restricted abortion were eight times as likely to have decided to work somewhere else.

One respondent wrote: “I did not want to have the additional abortion restrictions on top of all the difficulties of taking care of patients (e.g. young pregnant patient with cervical cancer). Women’s healthcare is challenging and frustrating as is, and I think my burnout would become unbearable if I were not able to provide the care that my patient wants.”