Medical students starting their third and fourth years are navigating required clerkships, specialty-specific electives, and sub-internship rotations. What are the tricks to making a good impression during these long weeks and months? Here’s a piece I wrote on how to succeed in your emergency medicine rotation; many of the tips translate to other rotations as well.
For the last several years I’ve made sure to blog on the annual Medscape Physician Survey that chronicles physician satisfaction. Unfortunately, it’s pretty much always bad news.
If you’re an optimist, you’ll be happy to hear that burnout rates were lower than last year. You may remember that the numbers skyrocketed during the pandemic. Last year 53% of physicians surveyed reported burnout and 23% reported depression. This year the numbers are 49% and 20%, respectively. If you’re a pessimist, you’ll notice that those numbers are still very high, with approximately half of the doctors surveyed reporting burnout. That’s a very big number.
Of note, emergency physicians are the most burned out at 63%, and the runner-up is obstetrics and gynecology at 53%. Plastic surgeons are the least burned out at 37%.
See more stratification and data by taking a look at the survey results here.
I read a fascinating piece by Dr. Thomas Cook in the December edition of Emergency Medicine News. In it, he cites work done by Cameron Gettel, MD who devised an interesting way to assess the attrition rate of emergency physicians (EPs): Gettel and his colleagues used data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), noting which healthcare providers stopped billing CMS for emergency medical services. Gettel used this information to calculate the attrition rate for EPs. What he and his colleagues found is that the EP attrition rate was approximately 5% prior to the pandemic while it shot up to approximately 8% in urban spots and more than 11% in rural areas during the first year of the pandemic.
Using information from the American Board of Emergency Medicine, Gettel found – shockingly – that the median age of attrition for male EPs was 53.5 years and for female EPs was 43.7 years in 2019. This means that the median EP career was around 23 years long for men and fewer than 14 years long for women. Wow!
It’s absolutely critical that medical students who are considering a career in emergency medicine think about what their professional trajectory might be, considering the short median lifespan of the typical EP.
For more information on this interesting topic and how attrition might affect the job market, the need for physician personal finance training, and who applies to emergency medicine, see Dr. Cook’s piece here.
Many medical students just starting their fourth years are coping with specialty-specific electives and sub-internship rotations. What are the tricks to making a good impression during these clerkships? Here’s a piece I wrote on how to succeed in your emergency medicine rotation; many of the tips translate to other specialty rotations as well.
Emergency medicine has had its ups and downs over the years with regard to desirability. Soon after the show “ER” became popular, emergency medicine programs also were suddenly in vogue. Over the interim years, the field’s cachet has declined and increased, but up until recent years, emergency medicine programs routinely filled 99% of their available spots in the Match.
The fact that 554 emergency spots went unfilled in this past Match was particularly distasteful to many emergency physicians, accordingly.
The reasons for this plummeting interest in the field is well described in a recent piece in ACEP Now. (ACEP stands for the American College of Emergency Physicians.) The authors note multiple issues, including burnout, decreasing remuneration, and systemic problems in the emergency healthcare system that frustrate clinicians.
Of note, these issues have driven out many middle-aged emergency physicians, as well.
Even if you are not interested in becoming an emergency doctor, take a look at the piece here, keeping in mind that certain factors may soon adversely affect other specialties as well.
(I’d like to give a shout out to my old friend Jonathan Fisher MD MPH who was one of the reporters on this article.)
Dr. Finkel is a graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Medical School. On completing her residency at Harvard, she was asked to stay on as faculty at Harvard Medical School and spent five years teaching at the world-renowned Massachusetts General Hospital. She was appointed to the Assistant Residency Director position for the Harvard Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency where she reviewed countless applications, personal statements and resumes. Read more
