| | What Are The Hot Specialties Today?
We receive calls and emails daily from residents, medical students, college students and even their parents wanting to know which medical specialties are in the greatest demand. Quite naturally, people want to be assured that there will be a demand for whatever specialty they (or their children) decide on. After considerable time, effort and money on a medical education, no one wants to face the prospect of unemployment or underemployment.
A detailed look at physician supply and demand trends can be found on this site at A Look at U.S. Physician Supply and Demand Trends. While the latter article outlines why we believe demand for physicians will remain strong in the short-term and the long-term, in this section we will look at what types of physicians are being aggressively recruited today.
Merritt, Hawkins & Associates (MHA), the nation's largest physician search firm (and one of the sponsors of this site) tracks physician recruiting trends through several surveys, including its 2003 Review of Physician Recruiting Incentives and its 2003 Survey of Hospital Physician Recruitment Trends, both available on this site.
In the first survey, MHA tracks the recruitment assignments it conducted over the previous 12 months to determine what types of physicians its clients are recruiting and what kinds of incentives clients are offering to physician candidates. MHA conducts some 2,500 permanent physician search assignments annually nationwide, and its 2003 Review is widely referenced throughout the health care staffing industry as reflective of current physician recruiting trends.
In the 12 months from April 1, 2002 to March 31, 2003, the top ten types of physician search assignments MHA conducted included:
Specialty
Radiology
Cardiology
Orthopedic surgery
Internal medicine
Family practice
Anesthesiology
OB/GYN
Gastroenterology
General surgery
Urology
While these were the searches most frequently requested by MHA's clients, the firm also searches in some 60 other specialties, allergy to vascular surgery. As a general rule, there is a demand for virtually every type of medical specialist today. Radiologists are in particularly high demand and are difficult to come by, as are cardiologists and orthopedic surgeons, for reasons explained in the article referenced above.
Though hospitals, medical groups and other employers are finding it more challenging to recruit specialists, this does not mean they have lost interest in recruiting primary care physicians.
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