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Shortage of board-certified ER doctors

Posted on: Monday, 22 December 2008, 18:49 CST

Staffing every U.S. hospital's emergency department with board-certified emergency physicians does not appear to be feasible, researchers suggest.

Thousands of emergency departments are not currently staffed by physicians with this type of training, study leader Dr. Carlos Camargo of the Massachusetts General Hospital says in a statement. We questioned whether staffing every department with residency-trained, board-certified emergency physicians -- which some individuals have advocated for decades -- was a realistic goal.

The researchers analyzed data from the 2005 National Emergency Department Inventories. Based on the approximately 22,000 board-certified emergency physicians in practice and the 1,350 who became newly certified during 2005, the team developed three scenarios for physician supply, all of which assumed the same number of new board-certified physicians each year.

The best-case scenario, which was intentionally unrealistic, assumed that no board-certified emergency physician died or retired; the worst case assumed an annual attrition rate of 12 percent; and the intermediate scenario assumed 2.5 percent attrition each year.

The study, published in the journal Academic Emergency Medicine, found having at least one board-certified emergency physician present in all U.S. hospital emergency departments at all times would require 40,000 physicians with such training, indicating that only 55 percent of 2005 demand was being met. Even if no board-certified emergency physician ever died or retired, it would take more than a decade to meet the goal.

Source: United Press International

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