AHA, Others Urge Congress to Increase Funding for the Children's Hospitals Graduate Medical Education Program

May 2024

Baldwin, Ranking Member Capito, Chair Aderholt and Ranking Member DeLauro:

The Children’s Hospitals Graduate Medical Education (CHGME) program is the most important federal investment supporting the pediatric physician workforce and access to care for the nation’s children. As groups dedicated to protecting and advancing the health of America’s children, we thank you for your longstanding bipartisan support of CHGME, including an increase in Fiscal Year (FY) 2024 funding, and ask you to provide $758 million in FY 2025 funding for the program, which is critical during the ongoing youth mental health crisis.

We are grateful for Congress’ consistent bipartisan support for the CHGME program, which, over the decades, has enabled children’s hospitals to dramatically increase pediatric physician training and significantly increase the number of pediatricians and pediatric specialists who care for the nation’s children. Each year, CHGME-funded children’s hospitals train thousands of general pediatricians and pediatric specialists like child and adolescent psychiatrists, pediatric surgeons, pediatric cardiologists, dentists, podiatrists and more. As you know, our country is currently facing a national health care workforce shortage, and pediatrics is no different. Your continued support for CHGME is vital to maintaining and strengthening the pediatric physician pipeline.

The CHGME program:

• Supports 1% of all hospitals in the U.S. while training the majority of the nation’s pediatricians and pediatric specialists.
• Represents just 1.7% of total federal spending on graduate medical education (GME).
• Supports local pediatric physician workforce with over 2/3 of CHGME-funded physicians staying in the state where they completed their residency.

We are grateful for your work to provide $390 million (the highest level to date) for CHGME in FY 2024 as that gets the program closer to alignment with the residency training funding of other federal programs. CHGME per-resident funding is currently about one-half of per-resident funding provided through other federal training programs. We need your support to boost funding for the CHGME program to help our pediatric patients now and into the future.

Boosting support for the pediatric workforce is even more important as we face the growing challenges of the children’s mental health crisis as well as future respiratory virus surges that will increasingly impact our pediatric health care workforce. CHGME supports the training of the front-line providers who are caring for our children and youth during these emergencies. Additionally, CHGME plays a critical role in combatting the worsening crisis in child and adolescent mental health, by funding the training of more than half of the developmental pediatricians and almost half of all child and adolescent psychiatrists. We cannot continue to fall behind—we must protect children’s access to care.

CHGME is a critical investment in our country’s health care future to help ensure children will have the care they need across provider settings. Again, thank you for your continued leadership in investing in the health care of all children and we urge strong support for the CHGME program with $758 million for FY 2025.

Sincerely,

Academic Pediatric Association 
America's Essential Hospitals 
American Academy of Pediatrics 
American Association of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 
American Hospital Association 
American Medical Association 
American Pediatric Society 
American Psychiatric Association 
American Psychological Association 
Association of American Medical Colleges 
Association of Medical School Pediatric Department Chairs 
Catholic Health Association of the United States 
Children’s Hospital Association 
Council of Pediatric Subspecialties 
Eating Disorders Coalition for Research, Policy & Action 
Family Voices 
Federation of American Hospitals 
First Focus Campaign for Children 
National Alliance on Mental Illness 
National Association for Behavioral Healthcare 
National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners 
National League for Nursing 
Pediatric Policy Council 
Premier Inc. 
REDC 
The Root Cause Coalition 
Society for Pediatric Research 
Vizient, Inc 
Youth Villages