Does Hospital Medicine Reinforce the Pillars of Career Satisfaction?

Within the 2011 State of Hospital Medicine report, one statistic in particular points to the youth of the medical specialty: Just over 10% of surveyed hospitalists had reached the rank of associate professor or higher.

How might the potential lack of mentorship within this immature field affect the ability of hospitalists to successfully navigate academia? So asked Gregory Misky, MD, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Colorado Denver, and his colleagues in a survey-based study. The results agree with other recent assessments that mentors are in short supply. “Academic hospital medicine groups have an acute need for mentoring and career development programs,” one study concludes.

The research of Dr. Misky and his collaborators found that only 42% of academic hospitalists could identify a mentor, while only 31% reported that they were mentoring another academic hospitalist.1 Based on sheer numbers and experience, the pool of mentors may significantly expand as the field matures. But Dr. Misky also urges some flexibility, noting that his own mentor is a non-hospitalist.

In his own research, Colin West, MD, PhD, associate professor of medicine and biostatistics at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., found that residents considering a career in HM placed less emphasis on the specialty or subspecialty of their mentor.5 Why? Very likely, he says, there just weren’t enough hospitalist mentors around to get a sense of what the career was all about.

Dr. West hopes the numbers suggest otherwise in the near future. “You want to recruit bright people into your specialty, but at the same time, you also want to recruit the right people,” he says. “And that means that you need to be able to expose people to a full breadth of what a decision to pursue a certain specialty really means.”