EM Workforce: “What does the future hold?”
Using workforce projections to chart a path forward.
During Sunday’s James D. Mills Lecture, Catherine Marco, MD, FACEP, did a deep dive into the data and anecdotal perspectives surrounding the future of the emergency medicine workforce.
“What does the future hold?” Dr. Marco asked the room. Before examining the current landscape and future outlooks, she took attendees back in time to the early years of the specialty.
She talked about her own experience as a medical student when her advisor, a general surgeon, questioned her decision to go into emergency medicine. “He couldn’t understand why anyone would choose such a substandard specialty,” she remembered. She contrasted that with an interaction she had with a general surgeon last week who said, “I could never do what you do. You have to know everything!”
“We’ve come a long way,” she explained. Now that emergency medicine is established, respected and growing quickly, what’s next?
Dr. Marco discussed the workforce data over the years, starting with a 1999 study and bringing us to current day. As she showed different models of the workforce trends and talked about varying methodologies, she referenced a quote by George E. P. Box: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” Dr. Marco went on to explain, “Any time we develop a model to examine or project what the future might hold, we accept at the beginning we're not going to get it right. It's an attempt to understand data, attempt to apply it to the future, but we know it's not going to be 100 percent correct.”
With that context in mind, she went into the current workforce projections and showed charts that demonstrated how minor changes to attrition rates, residency growth and other factors could significantly change the outlook for emergency physicians in the next decade.
One cannot separate workforce issues from workforce distribution; namely the fact that emergency physicians remain concentrated in urban areas. “This is going to be a recurrent theme,” Dr. Marco said, displaying a map of EM physicians employed across the U.S. “Distribution is a serious problem for emergency medicine.”
Dr. Marco explained the five key considerations of ACEP’s workforce efforts, and Immediate Past President Gillian Schmitz, MD, FACEP, helped answer questions from the audience about how different factors such as consolidation, reimbursement, residency growth and more are all key factors in the workforce equation. View ACEP’s workforce updates and progress.
Related: As promised in ACEP’s Framework of Workforce Considerations, ACEP is protecting the unique role of emergency physicians. A new scope of practice video debuted at ACEP Council on Thursday asks the question, “What happens when the wrong person is leading a patient’s care?” View the video and other scope of practice resources.
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