- There’s a growing problem for older Americans: doctors who specialize in geriatric care are dwindling.
- More than 80 million Americans are expected to be older than 65 by 2050, according to the US Census Bureau.
- However, geriatricians are in short supply, which could complicate access to care.
Jerry Gurwitz, a 68-year-old geriatrician based in Massachusetts, is at a tricky point in his career.
He’s spent decades taking care of older Americans, but now, as Gurwitz approaches the age of some of his own patients, he sees a brewing problem with his profession: there aren’t many people willing to take his job, and he has serious doubts over whether there will be enough doctors to properly take care of people as they get older, he told Business Insider.
Gurwitz, who graduated medical school in 1983, said he saw this problem brewing decades ago as he was completing his medical education. Part of the reason he chose to specialize in geriatric medicine was because practically comparatively few people were interested in the field, he said, a trend that hasn’t improved more than forty years later.
“These people are going to be retiring. There’s not substantial interest on the part of trainees to go into the field,” he said of the supply of geriatricians today. “I can’t see how the healthcare system isn’t going to be overwhelmed over the next decade. It’ll be too much, and too many people to take care of.”
Medical professionals say the problem has been in the making for years, with the supply of doctors trained specifically to treat older adults nowhere near keeping pace with a quickly aging US population.
There’s no clear path to addressing the shortage, Gurwitz said. He and other medical professionals told BI the influx of older patients could lead to a quality-of-care crisis.
The problem is visible in the numbers.
According to an estimate from the American Geriatrics Society, the US will need some 30,000 geriatricians by the end of the decade. Yet, the total number of board-certified geriatricians declined to around 7,400 in 2022, according to the American Board of Medical Specialities, down from around 10,000 at the start of the century —and the US population is quickly getting older.
According to the latest projections, the number of Americans aged 65 and older is expected to soar to 82 million by 2050, up 47% from 2022 levels.
Timothy Farrell, a geriatrician and a professor of medicine at the University of Utah, says the signs of strain on the profession have been increasing for years, but have become more severe recently.
Across the board, wait times have gotten longer, with the average wait for a physician appointment rising to 26 days, according to one 2022 survey, up 8% in five years.
“We could probably double our space, and we would very quickly fill,” Farrell said, adding that he believed stress in the geriatric unit could be higher than in other areas of the hospital.
R. Sean Morrison, a geriatrician at Mount Sinai, says he knows others in the industry who say they have waiting lists that stretch for six months.
The strain of caring for older adults is particularly evident in nursing homes. A survey of over 400 nursing homes conducted by the American Health Care Association found that 72% had fewer employees in 2024 than they did prior to the pandemic.
The survey also showed that 57% of nursing homes said they had a waiting list, 46% said they began to limit their intake of residents, and 7% said they were turning away patients on a daily basis.
“We don’t have right now, nor will we unfortunately ever have enough people who are trained,” Morrison said. “That’s evidenced by the amount of time it takes for an appointment within our geriatric practices. It’s evidenced by the number of older adults that need to be taken into the hospital that the inpatient services don’t have the capacity to see. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg.”
A dwindling medical profession
Gurwitz says he had always wanted to be a geriatrician, but the sentiment is rare among medical professionals. Data from the National Resident Matching Program showed that only 174 out of 419 available positions in geriatric specialty programs were filled in 2023, making it one of the most unfilled programs the organization tracks.
Convincing people to specialize in the field isn’t easy.
For one, the profession doesn’t pay as much as some specializations. According to data from Salary.com, the median salary for a geriatric physician in New York hovered around $264,163. That’s less than half the median salary of a cardiologist in New York, which stood at $573,498 a year as of March 1.
There is also a perception that geriatrics medicine is a less distinguishing field than other areas, Gurwitz said.
“I think there are certain fields of medicine that are more prestigious in which they are more respected than others. Geriatrics, for one reason or another, is not among those,” he added.
Farrell said he thinks that the complexity of treating older patients could be another factor turning professionals away from the trade. Geriatricians treat older adults who typically have overlapping health conditions, with some patients taking as many as 20 medications, he said.
“How do you prevent falls? How do you manage multiple chronic conditions for the same person?” he said. “I think there’s people in primary care who have more or less comfort with the complexity taking care of complicated, older adults, and that’s what geriatrician is trained to do.”
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