Family medicine continues to be the most highly recruited specialty, based on nearly 3,300 permanent physician and advanced practitioner search assignments posted from April 1, 2016, to March 31, 2017, through Merritt Hawkins’ and AMN Healthcare’s physician staffing companies.
It is the 11th consecutive year that family physicians topped the search list, and the specialty’s continued dominance is “underscoring the continued urgent demand for primary care physicians in an evolving health system,” Merritt Hawkins said in its annual report on physician recruiting.
“Primary care is increasingly the province of international medical graduates,” according to the report, which notes that U.S.-based medical students continue to show low interest in primary care because of low compensation and the perceived high level of personal time commitment required.
Demand for primary care physicians continues to grow and is likely to be exacerbated by the value-based payment models that are emerging in the wake of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA), the report added.
Psychiatry was the second most recruited specialty for just the second time in 24 years. The change “reflects a severe shortage of mental health professionals nationwide.”
The supply of psychiatrists is “already constrained and is soon going to diminish significantly. There currently are some 30,000 psychiatrists in active patient care in the United States, 60% of whom are 55 years or older, with many set to retire. ... With many psychiatrists aging out of the profession and with a preference among psychiatrists for outpatient practice settings, it is becoming increasingly difficult to recruit to inpatient settings.”
The top five most requested searches by medical specialty were:
- Family medicine (607), ranked first in the previous year.
- Psychiatry (256), ranked second in the previous year.
- Internal medicine (193), ranked third in the previous year.
- Nurse practitioner (137), ranked fifth in the previous year.
- Ob.gyn (109), ranked sixth in the previous year.