By Stephanie Sandhu

The lead in HBO’s hit series “The Pitt” serves as the wise and experienced attending physician in an urban emergency department.

Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, played by Noah Wyle, provides level-headed guidance to residents trying to make sense of a constant stream of challenging and varying medical conditions.

Now imagine walking into an emergency department and finding no Dr. Robby — just untrained, unsupervised medical students.

“The Pitt” depicts the reality and importance of hospital residency programs. Yet in Colorado, these programs are under threat from proposed budget cuts.

Dr. Robby, as the attending physician, can diagnose and fix the team’s treatment plans in seconds. But he didn’t get there overnight.

Like the trainees working alongside him, he learned by practicing medicine side-by-side with more experienced physicians.

The supervision built into residency training ensures the care you receive is safe. Funding residency programs ensures there will be an attending physician like Dr. Robby the next time you or a loved one steps into the emergency room.

Though I try to be nicer to my residents than Dr. Robby, I have, like him, committed my career to residency teaching. And I am deeply concerned by Gov. Jared Polis’ budget proposal to implement an $18.2 million cut to Colorado’s Graduate Medical Education (GME) funding — the very residency teaching programs that train our next generation of physicians.

Colorado already faces a critical physician shortage, and this proposed reduction is a textbook example of being penny-wise and pound-foolish. By reducing state spending by $18.2 million, we would trigger a loss of an estimated additional $41.5 million in federal matching funds. This means sacrificing more than $2 in federal money for every $1 the state hopes to save.

Cutting this funding will severely restrict the pipeline that enables Colorado-trained physicians to put down roots in our local communities. Studies show physicians are more likely to stay and practice medicine where they trained for residency. In fact, every physician from my family medicine residency training class still practices in Colorado, even though most of them did not attend medical school here.

And the effect will be felt most in our underserved communities. Our residency, like many others, cares mostly for patients with Medicaid or no insurance. Our training prepares residents to work at Colorado’s rural and urban community health centers. I have seen firsthand how community health centers across the state rely on our primary care residency programs to help close the physician workforce shortage gap.

In Colorado, there are more family medicine residency programs than for any other specialty. Family physicians help hold together a fraying primary care network. The proposed cuts to residency training funding threaten the primary care training programs we desperately need to sustain access.

The governor’s budget cut is a proposal, and the final decision rests with the state legislature. Lawmakers must prioritize the long-term health of our state over ill-advised reductions that would permanently shrink the physician workforce.

Protecting this funding is about investing in the doctors who will staff our emergency rooms, deliver babies and care for the complex needs of our aging and vulnerable populations across Colorado for decades to come. Cutting $18.2 million from the budget to ultimately lose nearly $60 million in vital teaching dollars simply does not make sense for Colorado. 

Dr. Stephanie Sandhu, MD, is a family physician who grew up and completed her medical training in Colorado and currently serves as faculty at the Intermountain Health St. Joseph Hospital Family Medicine Residency Program.