August 2024 Pick of the Month

 

Who Owns Academic Emergency Medicine?

This month’s POTM revisits the hot-button issue of workforce in emergency medicine. A few years ago, a report predicted an oversupply of emergency physicians, causing concern among medical students applying for residency who were interested in emergency medicine. Now, it seems emergency physicians are still in demand, but who they work for and in what setting continues to evolve – as is the case in much of medicine, which is more industrialized in the U.S. than ever before.  

In Estimating the size and scope of the academic emergency physician workforce, Gettel and colleagues explore a corollary question: what proportion of emergency departments are associated with an academic ACGME-accredited EM residency program? The answer to this question has obvious implications for the supply of emergency physicians. If a high number of emergency departments are training residents, it seems likely that supply might rapidly exceed demand. And the answer of 43% may surprise some, as it represents a high proportion, especially compared with other specialties. 

In an accompanying invited commentary, Academic emergency medicine: Common practice or underdeveloped?, Janke and Neumar point out that “Only 33% of medical school EM departments have an NIH- funded principal investigator (PI), compared to 54% across all clinical specialties.” 

It may seem a leap, but some will question by inference, is 43% representing “pseudo-academics”? This 43% number raises many questions: What is the definition of an academic emergency medicine department? Who controls this definition? Should this be regulated?

 

Jeffrey A. Kline, MD
Wayne State University School of Medicine
Editor-in-Chief