The shortage of doctors and nurses has been reported for years. We reported on it at least as far back as January 2011 and as recently as March 22 — and that’s not counting any passing reference to the problem in our coverage of PCOM South Georgia or the coronavirus crisis.

Older doctors are retiring. Others — frustrated with regulations, paperwork and difficulties getting paid — are simply leaving the field or moving into a more profitable niche of medicine that doesn’t involve Medicaid, emergency surgeries and all-night vigils.

Meanwhile, America has been slow to grow the number of young doctors entering the field.

It takes a long time to become a doctor. After high school is four years of college, then four years of medical school, then a residency (family medicine residency takes three years; other specialties are different). So high school graduates are looking at 11 years of education and apprenticeship — maybe more — before they can start treating patients on their own.

Potential medical students are aware of their elders’ frustrations, and they add their own concerns about student loan debt. Other career fields can start to look mighty appealing.

The outbreak of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, has exacerbated the problem. We need more physicians now to deal with the pandemic, and we don’t have them.

Several senators have proposed a solution: Import them.

Sens. David Perdue, R-Ga., Dick Durbin, D-Ill., Todd Young, R-Ind., and Christ Coons, D-Del., are co-sponsoring a bill that would reallocate 25,000 unused immigrant visas for nurses and 15,000 for doctors and instruct the State Department and Department of Homeland Security to expedite processing them.

Short-term, this is an essential response. This is how we will get medical personnel that we need quickly.

Durbin pointed out that one-sixth of our health care providers are already foreign-born. The Senate bill would continue a long tradition of bringing in trained workers that America needs.

Long-term, though, we hope this crisis will turn attention to America’s pipeline for these fields. We need our public schools to be more effective at teaching science so high school graduates are prepared for health care careers. We need support for college students so that loans are a less serious complication of getting an education. We need more medical colleges like PCOM South Georgia, which promises to be a blessing to our region as its students continue their studies and approach graduation. 

But the big need identified in 2011 by Jim Lowry, who was CEO of Colquitt Regional Medical Center at the time, is for residency programs. The idea he espoused almost a decade ago led to the South Georgia Medical Education and Research Consortium the following year. That consortium consists of five South Georgia hospitals — Colquitt Regional, Phoebe Putney in Albany, Tift Regional in Tifton, South Georgia Medical Center in Valdosta and Archbold Memorial Hospital in Thomasville — with the general plan being to have a residency program at each hospital. Phoebe Putney already had such a program, affiliated with the Medical College of Georgia (now Augusta University). 

Since the consortium’s founding, though, the only program brought to reality has been Georgia South Family Medicine Residency at Colquitt Regional.

Georgia South, a collaboration with the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, opened the door for a medical college here, PCOM South Georgia.

While speaking with The Observer about the medical college’s opening last August, South Georgia Campus Officer Joanne Jones mentioned PCOM was trying to get grants to start residency programs at two of the consortium’s other hospitals. 

One week after PCOM South Georgia’s opening, Colquitt Regional announced it had received a grant to begin a psychiatric residency program in conjunction with Turning Point Hospital here. Candidates for the inaugural class will be interviewed later this year.

These South Georgia programs are helping to meet the nation’s critical need for doctors, but every stage of the process requires collaboration among groups with different agendas, and nearly every stage requires the expenditure of public money to make the process happen. In the case of PCOM South Georgia, the City of Moultrie, Colquitt County and the Moultrie-Colquitt County Development Authority paid the college $2 million in incentives, and at least one private group — the Waldo Deloache Charitable Trust — added $150,000 more over five years. 

The grant to start the psychiatric residency is $750,000 in federal money.

But these are costs that the nation, the states and even local governments will have to pay to build our health system big enough and strong enough to face the challenges of the 21st century.