Is med school right for me?

Bigredmed
Sun, 11 Jul 2010 14:33:38 +0000

Certainly, there are also things like demand that push the market…certainly no field is this more true than pediatrics, where the supply of sub-specialists (pediatric trained specialists in cardiology, nephrology, endocrinology, rheumatology, etc…as well as child psychiatry and developmental pediatricians) are limited and concentrated at academic centers and free standing children’s hospitals.

I have patients who need referral to specialists and the first appointment they can get is in February of 2011 (to see a developmental pediatrician). Certainly in teh case of developmental pediatricians, the clinic visits are extensive, with an initial intake visits taking from 4-8 hours once all the educational testing is done. They DO spend the time you might think appropriate, and they see perhaps 4-5 patients a day…but the counterpoint is that it impacts the wait. They are always searching for new clinicians to add, but are limited in part too by the number of ancillary staff (Child psychologists, speech pathologists, educational testing techs, nurses) they can hire. Simpling hiring a new MD (recruiting from the limited pool of new fellowship trained doctors) does not necessarily result in increased patient capacity because of all the other people who must be involved.

In other fields, where the problems are more acute, more life threatening, and need more consistent regular follow up (there aren’t many autism emergencies for the developmental pediatrician to respond to), patients have to be overbooked in order to make sure the sick patients get seen and the well patients get the continued management they deserve…