Current fellows how’s the job hunt 2019

[Med Director New England]

Similar iterations of this post have circulated Before. Wondering how thing are now.

I am good friends with an MD recruiter around Boston and currently for family practice his clients are offering base of 225-250 salary, + performance based bonus, + bene’s, + matching on 401k up to IRS max, 25 K sign on, and 100K loan forgiveness for 5 yrs of work (20K /yr). And still has huge difficulty recruiting new hires. Folks visit once and often twice and get dozens of offers and more often than not he lose recruits. And this is in towns with some of the best school districts in the country. I know this person well and am certain these numbers are accurate. He deals mostly with primary care recruiting but tells me it is much more difficult to recruit a gen surg or specialized surgeon (not sure of specific numbers for this group).

Just a benchmark..not saying paths deserve more or less but wondering how the offers of current path grads compare.

Also in general struck that many sub specialities have the luxury of having difficulty filling positions whereas path has 50 applicants fighting for every job out there...

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[deleted314957]

AP/CP=internship + 5 yrs =less pathologists

 

[tiredguy]

Similar iterations of this post have circulated Before. Wondering how thing are now.

[...]

Also in general struck that many sub specialities have the luxury of having difficulty filling positions whereas path has 50 applicants fighting for every job out there...

How are things now? There are 50 applicants fighting for every job out there, I've heard.

 

[HeyDalaron]

AP/CP=internship + 5 yrs =less pathologists

I agree with internship requirements. I trained in Canada where internship is a mandatory part of pathology residency, and I felt it an extremely valuable year where clinicopathologic correlations are solidified and the weight of one's actions is emphasized, so that the gravity of them is realized when fixed behind the scope. I find it surprising that clinical internships are not required in pathology residencies in the USA, and wonder if a return to them would be an overall benefit for the field's health.

 

[deleted314957]

I agree with internship requirements. I trained in Canada where internship is a mandatory part of pathology residency, and I felt it an extremely valuable year where clinicopathologic correlations are solidified and the weight of one's actions is emphasized, so that the gravity of them is realized when fixed behind the scope. I find it surprising that clinical internships are not required in pathology residencies in the USA, and wonder if a return to them would be an overall benefit for the field's health.

You and I seem to be alone on this. If nothing more, it gives one a bit more cred with the clinicians. The old “walk a mile in my shoes” idea. Also, 5 yrs residency might mean fewer fellowships. In any event, this proposal would weed out lots of deadwood and increase the viability of the field.

 

[octopusprime]

You and I seem to be alone on this. If nothing more, it gives one a bit more cred with the clinicians. The old “walk a mile in my shoes” idea. Also, 5 yrs residency might mean fewer fellowships. In any event, this proposal would weed out lots of deadwood and increase the viability of the field.

It makes about as much sense to have clinicians do a year of path training as it does to have paths do a year of clinical internship...the "walk a mile in my shoes" goes both ways... If one can't glean the nuances and intricacies of clinical medicine from their current vantage point without first completing a year of abuse as an intern, that person has no business being in medicine in the first place. Mandatory internship would be a complete waste of time, particularly when people are already doing 1-2 fellowships...so you want someone to train for 6-7 years then enter a marketplace that can't sustain them? Pass, unless it's coupled with cutting the number of overall residents.

The only value this proposition has is to weed out a few that would otherwise have done path...no idea how many people that would be but I don't think it would be significant...and it's not going to make trainees become better pathologists, just older and more in debt.

 

[gbwillner]

You and I seem to be alone on this. If nothing more, it gives one a bit more cred with the clinicians. The old “walk a mile in my shoes” idea. Also, 5 yrs residency might mean fewer fellowships. In any event, this proposal would weed out lots of deadwood and increase the viability of the field.

This approach will have one great side effect- the required budget cannot easily change for residencies, so adding an extra year of training means funding must decrease that year for each program. That means total slots for new residents has to go down. That would improve the market for existing practitioners.

 

[octopusprime]

This approach will have one great side effect- the required budget cannot easily change for residencies, so adding an extra year of training means funding that year. That means total slots for new residents has to go down. That would improve the market for existing practitioners.

yeah CMS wouldn't willfully fund another year for all path trainees, and the departments would fight it.

 

[Med Director New England]

Most of these replies are getting at oversupply - while I agree - replying to refocus the string to the details of offers any recent path grads are getting AND to point out out a field (FP) that historically hasn’t gotten salaries anywhere close to pathologists probably now is. Considering the shorter time for training, 3 vs at least 5, FP strictly from a salary perspective might be a much wiser choice than entering path in the current market

 

[Alteran]

You and I seem to be alone on this. If nothing more, it gives one a bit more cred with the clinicians. The old “walk a mile in my shoes” idea. Also, 5 yrs residency might mean fewer fellowships. In any event, this proposal would weed out lots of deadwood and increase the viability of the field.

Don't kid yourself. Clinicians would cannibalize each other if they could...but they can't. Even the lowly family medicine doc has power over the high-dollar specialists. There was a resident in my program who was a practicing family medicine doc of several years, and left the field thinking the grass was greener. She told me that there were a couple of specialists who were less than pleasant to her, so she stopped referring patients to them. That got their attention real quick and they became a whole lot nicer and more accommodating. Pathology has no such ability, in any capacity.

You can't really be respected if you don't have anything to fight back with and I don't think voluntarily undergoing a year of misery is going to change that. Pathology has taken what economists call an "inelastic good" and through shear stupidity turned it into a commodity sold to the lowest bidder.