Hand in hand with the publication of our journal has been our research initiative. I firmly believe that in order for SHM to lead hospital medicine, we must also lead in the area of research. In order to coordinate and expand our efforts in research, we recently brought Kathleen Kerr on board at SHM as a senior advisor to lead our research initiative. Kathleen brings a new level of rigor and enthusiasm to our research initiative and helps support the outstanding work of our research committee led by Andy Auerbach, MD. At SHM research reflects our members and includes hospitalists from all settings. I invite you to present your work at our annual meeting (we are currently accepting submissions through Jan. 6, 2006, for the Research, Innovations and Clinical Vignettes competition for the 2006 annual meeting) so we can all benefit and learn from the work we are doing. I also invite you to submit your work for publication in the Journal of Hospital Medicine.
Core Competency
Yet another sign of our maturing as a field will be the publication of the Core Competencies in Hospital Medicine as a supplement to the first volume of the Journal of Hospital Medicine. The core competencies reflect hundreds of hours of work by a dedicated group of hospitalists and SHM staff led by Tina Budnitz MPH, to define the core of what hospitalists need to know. Yes, hospitalists are more than just timesavers for other physicians. The core competencies in hospital medicine will outline what hospital medicine is about and serve as the foundation for educational programs, curricula, and initiatives in hospital medicine. The core competencies will also form the basis for certification of hospitalists by defining the key attitudes and skills needed to be a hospitalist. Look for the core competencies in early 2006 along with your first volume of the journal.
Evolution of Other “Ists”
If imitation is the finest form of flattery, then hospitalists should be very flattered by the proliferation of other “-ists.” Within our own field we find “nocurnists,” hospitalists who care for patients in the hospital overnight. Although it is not clear whether being a nocturnist is a permanent state in which you work only nights or a title that you hold temporarily, it is clear that “hospitalist” is leading to a wide use of the “-ist” suffix to describe the practice of physicians.
Even more interesting is the emergence of hospitalists in other fields such as surgery and obstetrics (see our related coverage in The Hospitalist—“What Is a Laborist,” Oct. 2005, p. 6; “Trendwatch: The specialization of hospital medicine,” Oct. 2005, p. 27; and “The Doctor Is In: The role of psychiatric hospitalists,” Oct. 2005, p. 30). Because the “ist” doesn’t work well universally (neither “surgicalist” nor “obstetricist” sounds right and neither does “deliverist”) the terms being used are “surgical hospitalist” or “OB hospitalist.” In either case the idea is that there is a physician, surgeon, or an obstetrician who sees patients in the hospital instead of the patients’ primary physician. Typically these physicians are employed by the hospital to care for unassigned patients admitted through the emergency department. The adoption of “hospitalist” by other fields in medicine to describe clinicians whose professional identity revolves around the hospital is a testament to the acceptance—and even normalization—of hospitalists and to the profound change in the way we care for hospitalized patients brought about by our field.
We certainly have come a long way from the days when our newly formed society decided not to use the word hospitalist or hospital or anything like it in our name for fear of inciting animosity. In just a few short years we find a world where hospitalist is in the dictionary and other physicians begin to use the term to describe themselves. Reflecting this maturing of our field, SHM is involved in several initiatives including certification, research, a journal, and core competencies to further define hospital medicine.