Tufts Studies New M.D. Plan To Reduce Hospital Training

The Tufts New England Medical Center received a grant Wednesday to study the feasibility of an M.D. degree program to train general primary care practitioners.

Dr. Samuel Proger, former chief of medicine at the center, said yesterday that medical students would not receive hospital practice training.

There would be no legal restrictions on the areas of functioning of the non-hospital trained doctor. Proger said that students in the program would be legally able to treat any disease once they receive their degree, as doctors with traditional training currently are.

Proger said the program will introduce general primary care as a new specialty field. Doctors would treat all ambulatory patients, and would concentrate on the early diagnosis of serious diseases, referring all such cases to specialists or hospitals.

Doctors graduating from the program would not have hospital admitting privileges.

Social and behavioral studies will receive great emphasis in the project Tufts plan. Proger yesterday described the new doctor as a compromise between the present medical practitioner and a psychiatrist.

Boston University's Dr. Joel Alpert, author of the soon to be published "Education of Physicians for Primary Care," said yesterday that B.U. is running a similar program. The B.U. program includes some hospital training, and Alpert called it a "less radical departure" from the established course of study.

Russia, China and Britain all run nationalized primary care plans. Both Proger and Alpert described their projects as most similar to Britain's, although the British method relies heavily on hospital practice training.