Early on, the medical community in Canada considered that the role of family medicine hospitalist might be a temporary one, taken to give family practice medicine time to regain strength, says Dr. Enns. “Now, there are no signs that it’s temporary,” she says. “It’s an effective method of patient care, and the community has embraced it. There are no more naysayers.”
Getting new physicians interested in the specialty is key, says Dr. Chmelik.
“Fellowships for further training are important,” she says. “We need to work with medical students too, show them there are options within the field. They want choices.”
Dr. Gundersen suggests that whether one is an internist or a family-physician hospitalist may not make much difference in years to come. “I think that in the future physicians will be classified on the basis of whether they are outpatient or inpatient doctors, rather than all these other designations,” he says. “It’s getting harder and harder to be both.” TH
Joen Kinnan is a frequent contributor to The Hospitalist.