According to data from the American Academy of Pediatrics, over 2,000 physicians – or approximately 70% of all physicians practicing pediatric hospital medicine – do so in a community hospital. Like all areas of hospital medicine, community pediatric hospital medicine (CPHM) strives to fulfill one of our field’s central tenets – providing high-quality, evidence-based care to our patients.
Dr. Gregory Welsh
A phrase often used among CPHM practitioners is that, “if you’ve seen one CPHM program, you’ve seen one CPHM program.” Every CPHM program is different. While this phrase may seem rather simplistic, it quite accurately portrays a unique aspect of our place in the hospital medicine field. CPHM programs usually require their practitioners to perform a broader range of roles and responsibilities than our colleagues who practice in university or children’s hospitals. Typically, these roles are aligned with the unique needs of each hospital within which we practice and the communities we serve. Factors such as the distance to a tertiary care referral center, access to subspecialists, availability and expertise of ancillary services for children, and the particular needs of each community further shape the role that CPHM practitioners may be asked to play.
In 2014, the AAP section on hospital medicine’s subcommittee on community hospitalists surveyed all CPHM programs to understand the unique roles that practitioners play within their institutions. Under the leadership of Clota Snow, MD, and Jacques Corriveau, MD, the aim was to contact every hospital in the country using the American Hospital Directory to see if they had a PHM program and to identify what roles the program was responsible for within their hospital.
Of the 535 programs identified, the primary responsibilities included inpatient care (85%), ED consultations (76%) and newborn nursery care (73%). Other common roles not typically associated with a university-based hospitalist’s responsibilities included delivery room attendance/neonatal resuscitations (44%), neonatal ICU management (47%) and subspecialty or surgical comanagement (52%). In some communities, even pediatric ICU management, sedation, and patient transport are part of our role. Because of the large breadth of roles that a CPHM practitioner may cover, we have often been referred to as “pediatric hospital-based generalists.”
Ideally, the presence of a pediatric hospitalist in a community hospital allows children to obtain high-quality, evidence-based care within their home communities. Most hospitalized children do not require direct access to subspecialists or all the pediatric-specific resources only available within a university or children’s hospital. Thus, if these resources are not required for the child’s care, CPHM practitioners can provide the care that a child needs in a setting that is less disruptive to the family and typically more cost effective.
CPHM physicians are often drawn to a career in a community hospital because it allows them to use their entire skill set to care for children with a wide variety of conditions. As they are often the only physicians in an adult hospital with a full understanding of the unique aspects of care that children require, it is important that they be comfortable in their role of managing the majority of pediatric care independently. Yet they also need to understand the limitations of their own ability, as well as their institution’s level of expertise in pediatric-specific care. They must be confident and vocal advocates for pediatric-specific needs throughout their institution and its numerous committees, and form close working relationships with colleagues and administrators in the different fields with whom we share care of our patients (e.g., ED, obstetrics, radiology, trauma, and other medical and surgical subspecialties).
CPHM physicians are particularly well suited to partner with local outpatient providers as well as tertiary care physicians to provide coordinated transitions between the inpatient and outpatient management of a child’s illness. In addition, a CPHM physician can often bring a unique and valuable perspective of the particular ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic diversity of their community, as well as its available resources, to facilitate a greater level of engagement with the child’s needs and ultimate success of their care.
The 2014 survey of CPHM programs identified several major challenges to recruitment and career satisfaction as a CPHM physician. These include a lack of access to subspecialists, a lack of pediatric-specific ancillary services and the perception that our importance as community hospital providers was not valued as much in the PHM community as PHM physicians working in a university/children’s hospital setting. With the recent recognition of PHM as an official subspecialty by the American Board of Pediatrics, the concern has intensified within our field that a two-tiered system will develop with some PHM physicians being board certified and others not.
While the development of board subspecialization was not meant to limit the pool of providers available to staff community hospital sites, there is nowhere near the number of fellowship trained physicians to provide an adequate workforce to staff CPHM programs. This means that many CPHM physicians will not be board certified in pediatric hospital medicine but does not mean that CPHM programs will be unable to provide high-quality local care that benefits children and their families, including safe care for children who require the skills that an immediately available CPHM physician can provide.
Many pediatric residency programs do not currently provide their trainees with exposure to community hospital medicine. Further, with increased sub-specialization throughout pediatrics, fewer residents are developing the necessary skill set to perform roles integral to a caring for children in community hospitals such as stabilization of a critically ill child prior to transport and complex neonatal resuscitation.
A career in CPHM provides physicians with the opportunity to work together with a close-knit group to provide exceptional care to children and to advocate for the medical needs of children in their hospital and their community. The AAP’s subcommittee has made it a priority to engage physicians during all parts of their pediatric training about why a career in CPHM is exciting, fulfilling and a great life, as well as continuing to educate training programs at every level – as well as the larger PHM community – about why CPHM is a valuable and important part of pediatric medicine.
Dr. Welsh is a clinical associate professor of pediatrics at the Stanford (Calif.) University in the division of pediatric hospital medicine. He has practiced community pediatric hospital medicine for over 27 years in Washington state and the San Francisco Bay Area. He is the chair of the working group of the Future of Community Pediatric Hospital Medicine for the AAP section on hospital medicine’s subcommittee on community hospitalists.