I read a fascinating piece by Dr. Thomas Cook in the December edition of Emergency Medicine News. In it, he cites work done by Cameron Gettel, MD who devised an interesting way to assess the attrition rate of emergency physicians (EPs): Gettel and his colleagues used data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), noting which healthcare providers stopped billing CMS for emergency medical services. Gettel used this information to calculate the attrition rate for EPs. What he and his colleagues found is that the EP attrition rate was approximately 5% prior to the pandemic while it shot up to approximately 8% in urban spots and more than 11% in rural areas during the first year of the pandemic.

Using information from the American Board of Emergency Medicine, Gettel found – shockingly – that the median age of attrition for male EPs was 53.5 years and for female EPs was 43.7 years in 2019. This means that the median EP career was around 23 years long for men and fewer than 14 years long for women. Wow!

It’s absolutely critical that medical students who are considering a career in emergency medicine think about what their professional trajectory might be, considering the short median lifespan of the typical EP.

For more information on this interesting topic and how attrition might affect the job market, the need for physician personal finance training, and who applies to emergency medicine, see Dr. Cook’s piece here.