LBJ Names Bunting, Ebert to Panel

President Johnson has appointed three members of the University to a new committee which will study ways to ease America's "crucial shortage" of doctors.

Mary I. Bunting, President of Radcliffe and lecturer on Microbial Genetics will be a member of the new National Advisory Council on Health Manpower.

Dr. Robert H. Ebert, dean of the Harvard Medical School, and Dr. Alonzo S. Yerby, now hospital commissioner of New York City, will also serve on the panel. Yerby will leave his post this fall to take a chair in Health Services Administration at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Mrs. Bunting said yesterday that the council was created because of a groving concern in Washington over the country's acute shortage of doctors, nurses, and laboratory technicians. Medicare and the establishment of new Federal medical centers across the country, she said, will strain present resources even more.

Starting this June, the commission will make a survey of medical needs and then propose ways of increasing the number of physicians trained each year.

The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare is now collecting statistics on hospital care, Ebert said. Although any of the committee's recommendations will be based upon final study of that data, he suggested several proposals that will be discussed.

* The Federal government could begin a major program to build new medical and nursing schools and to expand the size of the present ones.

* Hospitals could use existing personnel more efficiently by organizing there into a "health team" that would work as a unit, Under this system, nurses would take over many routine functions now performed by doctors -- screening patients before admitting them to hospitals, or starting intravenous feedings.

* Students graduating from high school could begin medical study immediately and receive the M.D. degree in six years, as is now the practice in many European countries.

* The eight years which a student entering medical school from college now spends in schooling internship and residency could be reduced to six fewer depending upon the specialty involved.

Ebert cautioned that shortened training programs would offer less flexibility on the college or medical school level, but said that the quality of a medical education would not necessarily suffer.