By Debbie Gregory.

The U.S. military is reportedly finalizing plans to eliminate more than 17,000 uniformed medical professionals, including physicians, dentists, nurses and other healthcare professionals, resulting in a 13 percent cut to its medical workforce.

“Part of this drill is to realign our people to the appropriate level of workload so that their skills, both for battlefield care and for beneficiary care, improve,” said one Defense Department official.

While senior officials discussed the reasons for the cuts, they declined to confirm exact figures, as those numbers will not be made official until the fiscal year 2020 defense budget is approved by the White House, and sent to Congress next month. If both branches approve the budget, the reductions will take effect in fiscal year 2021.

The reduction will allow a deepening of the workload of remaining medical billets at base hospitals and clinics to strengthen medical skills, as well as improving quality of care for beneficiaries, according to defense officials.

The staff cuts are worrisome for patient access, particularly to physicians young families rely on such as pediatricians and obstetricians, according to retired Navy Capt. Kathryn M. Beasley, director of government relations for health issues at the Military Officers Association of America.

“We need to see the final numbers to understand the impact,” she said.

But senior defense officials, who say they collaborated closely with the services on overall staff reduction plans, contend the current force is larger than needed to meet today’s operational missions and is overloaded with skill sets not useful for deployment and delivering of battlefield care.

Defense officials conceded the staff cuts, and refocusing on deployable skills, over time will change the mix of providers delivering care on base, forcing more family care off base and onto Tricare provider networks.

“We will expect to see an increase in certain skill sets [and] a decrease in other skill sets,” said one official. “More trauma surgeons, fewer pediatricians, for example. Those kinds of changes are right at the heart of what Congress has directed us to do.”