Children’s Hospitals Graduate Medical Education (CHGME) Funding
The Childhood Cancer Caucus strongly supports the Children’s Hospital Graduate Medical Education (CHGME) program which provides freestanding children’s hospitals with federal GME funding to support pediatric medical training and research. Over the past decade, CHGME has successfully expanded and improved the delivery of pediatric health care across the nation.
The CHGME program is critical to our mission to eradicate pediatric cancer, providing the funds to train nearly 60% of all pediatric oncologists. In fact, the program trains more than half of many pediatric specialists, including 65% of pediatric surgeons and 100% of pediatricians specializing in neurodevelopmental disabilities. Overall, the 56 freestanding children’s teaching hospitals that receive CHGME train 40% of all general pediatric residents and 43% of all pediatric specialty residents.
Since its enactment in 1999, the CHGME program has proven to be a remarkable success, attracting wide bicameral and bipartisan support.
On April 1, 2014, the House passed S. 1557, the Children’s Hospital GME Support Reauthorization Act, which would extend the CHGME program through FY 2018, at its current authorization level of $2400 million per year