The holiday season, despite the hustle and bustle, can be a time of reflection. Thanksgiving is a time to reflect on what you have. The secular version of Christmas is a deep plunge into materialism and getting the things you desire. Then come those New Year’s resolutions in which you swear off material things and promise yourself you will become the person you have always wanted to be.
For those in academic settings educating the next cohort of physicians, this time of year has its own rituals. Undergraduate and medical school applications are being reviewed. Medical students are interviewing for residencies. Match day for residents seeking subspecialty fellowships occurs in mid-December. The other residents are starting to interview for real jobs. Overall, a vast undertaking occurs in which talents and aspirations are matched with finite and practical opportunities.
My goal is to advocate for the health of children, so I am concerned about how well pediatrics attracts the best and brightest minds. The best training programs in the world are still going to produce mediocre doctors if we start with mediocre talent. The stakes in recruiting talent are huge. The Washington Post has been running a series on the disappearance of the middle class. Some articles have lamented that the finance sector has recently siphoned off the best and brightest minds to make money by pushing money, rather than creating new technology, products, and jobs (“A black hole for our best and brightest,” by Jim Tankersley on Dec. 14, 2014). My second concern is nourishing the ideals and aspirations of those physician seedlings. Few people keep all their New Year’s resolutions for the entire year, but even partial credit can be important progress in a balanced life.
First, we need to attract people to science. There is a recognized shortage of high school students going into STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math). Various programs have been created to attract high school students, and particularly women, to those fields (“Women flocking to statistics, the newly hot, high-tech field of data science,” by Brigid Schulte, the Washington Post, Dec. 19, 2014). This then needs to be reinforced in college. For instance, the analysis of big data in health care is a burgeoning field. We need statisticians who can do the work.
Then we need to attract people to medicine. I’ve been in a few conversations recently about a book titled “Doctored: The Disillusionment of the American Physician,” by Dr. Sandeep Jauhar. I haven’t read more than a few excerpts from the book. An abbreviated version is the author’s essay, “Why Doctors Are Sick of Their Profession,” in the Wall Street Journal (Aug. 29, 2014).
There were enough inaccuracies in that article to dissuade me from reading further, but your mileage may differ. There are data to both support and refute most of his assertions. I believe he is correct that there have been some Faustian bargains made by the past two generations of doctors. Medicine welcomed the improved revenues from Medicare and Medicaid coverage. Those programs improved access, justice, health outcomes, and especially doctors’ incomes, but at a steep price to society. The Golden Goose Dr. Jauhar cited was indeed killed. The following generation of doctors has had to deal with managed care, preapprovals, and denials of payment, along with other cost controls. It was irrational to think that all that money from the government to physicians was going to flow indefinitely without strings. In a related development, the resulting paperwork has crushed solo office practice. Rather than being entrepreneurs, recently boarded pediatricians are trending toward larger group practices and salaried positions. So that affects the degree of independence in a medical career.
In pediatrics, physicians invest considerable time to open career paths into subspecialty areas that interest them, even if the income and lifestyle aren’t better and don’t justify the time and expense of further training. Pediatric hospital medicine is progressing toward becoming a boarded subspecialty with 2-year fellowships. Will that attract the best and brightest of the residents?
Continuing medical education is needed to maintain a knowledge base and a skill set. I assert there also needs to be continuing examination and reinforcement of one’s ideals and life goals. As a pediatrician, I am biased toward believing that maintaining a recommended daily allowance of that activity outperforms making New Year’s resolutions. We all know that crash diets rarely work in the long run.
What practical steps can be taken in the pediatrician’s office? Put up posters that encourage STEM education. Ask adolescents about their plans. The health and life expectancy of your patient will be related far more to his or her career choice than to the discovery of the next medicine to treat chronic hepatitis C. Spending just a moment of each adolescent well visit to explore his/her aspirations also may be just the medicine you need to avoid disillusionment. Maybe you will even inspire a bright teenager to become a pediatrician.