A Comparison of Surgical Subspecialty Match Rates in 2022 in the United States.

This paper examines the 2022 surgical subspecialty results within the Match hosted yearly by the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) in the United States. It exists to place medical graduates with post-graduate training programs via an algorithm based on ranked lists provided by both residency programs and individual applicants around the world. This paper compares the match rates between allopathic medical graduates (MDs) and osteopathic medical graduates (DOs). Using published NRMP data and reports from Program Director surveys, we explored possible reasons for match rate differences between the two groups, hypothesizing that lower match rates among DOs could be explained by completion of less volunteerism, research, or curricular activities that may have affected their overall first-choice match rates in competitive surgical specialties. While the data showed that MDs consistently out-matched DOs, the cause was deemed multifactorial as the data did not provide concrete evidence to the contrary. We concluded that more data over time should be collected to understand why osteopathic students do not match as well as allopathic students in surgical specialties.

COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy in a Rural Primary Care Setting.

As the United States clamors with anti-vax protests, researchers seek to understand what social and behavioral values are keeping patients from electing to vaccinate themselves against the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) virus. Over the past year, the race to vaccinate has become less about developing working vaccines and more about finding ways to encourage vaccine uptake. This paper examines the question of vaccine hesitancy in rural Chemung County, NY. In identifying various psychosocial barriers to patient vaccination, which we hypothesize will be mostly political, we seek to understand the local mindset in the hope that our data guide the way to change it.