As a fourth-year medical student, Adrienne Green recently found herself facing what she says her peers might call “a nuclear-level disaster.” Green is an aspiring vascular surgeon who expects to graduate from Loma Linda University’s medical school in California this May. For most students like her, graduation isn’t the end — it’s really just the beginning. After medical school, newly minted physicians usually join hospital-based residency programs, where they complete anywhere between three to nine years of on-the-job training before becoming fully licensed independent practitioners.

But despite the great need for more doctors, there are still huge gaps between the number of aspiring physicians and the space available to train them, a dynamic that keeps perfectly well-qualified medical school applicants and graduates out of the pipeline.

https://www.vox.com/22989930/residency-match-physician-doctor-shortage-pandemic-medical-school