“The acute-care management skills that they have in the hospital, we can use them in these other sites of care,” he adds. “They aren’t just limited to the hospital anymore.”
Another angle of career development is career inception, so newly minted by SHM president Eric Howell, MD, SFHM. In fact, Dr. Howell made recruitment of the next generation of hospitalists and HM leaders a major plank of his one-year term. Of the society’s 12,000 members, just 500 are medical students and house staff members. He’d like to triple that figure by HM14.
He believes that the same professional and personal factors that have swelled the specialty’s ranks to some 40,000 practitioners will appeal to younger physicians. On the clinical side, that includes a focus on QI at a time when health care is being pushed to be better and a chance to be a leader in the hospital of the future. On a positive note, Dr. Howell, chief of hospital medicine at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center in Baltimore, says hospitalists continue to see their compensation rise along with good work-life balance.
“For our specialty to be just as powerful, and just as important, and thrive just as much in the next 16 years as it has in the past 16 years, we are going to need high-quality recruits—and a lot of them,” Dr. Howell says.
Richard Quinn is a freelance writer in New Jersey.