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Fill the Gap: Strategies for addressing the otolaryngology workforce shortage

by Gretchen Henkel •

Most patients embraced this viable delivery method, said Dr. Arriaga, but there were a few barriers. For example, the scope clouded in patients with moist ears, and some patients resisted remote care delivery. But overall, Dr. Arriaga said, telemedicine provided a way to “increase the availability of care in a situation where we would have had to either turn people away or to create wait environments that would have been clinically unacceptable.”

Figure 2: Physician supply and demand projections. Extrapolated to 2025.

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SOURCE: ANNALS OF SURGERY. 2007;246(4):527-534
Figure 2

Going Forward

Dr. Cooper believes that all physicians should engage in public policy debates and work to increase GME funding. It might also be helpful, he said, for specialists to speak as a bloc, rather than as separate entities, when working with Congress and other policymakers.

Steven B. Levine, MD, who practices at ENT and Allergy Associates, LLC, in Trumbull, Conn., agrees with this notion. As legislative chair and president-elect of the Connecticut ENT Society, he said, “Banding together with our brethren in ophthalmology, orthopedic surgery, and anesthesiology, among others, has helped us gain a better voice in our legislative process at the state level.”

Dr. Kennedy plans to take over as chair of the AAO’s Physician Workforce Committee. In the next three years, he said, “we will be getting some of the brightest minds together within the specialty to start thinking in a proactive fashion about the direction we want to take. One thing we can guarantee is that our practice will not stay the same. We don’t want to mortgage the future of our specialty by ignoring change.”

Dr. Levine, who is also a member of the AAO-HNS Board of Governors, applauds these discussions at both the leadership and membership levels but takes a bit of an optimist’s view on the issue of physician shortages. The shift in the supply and demand curve, which will reduce physician supply relative to patient demand, may not be an entirely bad thing, he posits. “It might be a mistake to try to avoid that shift, or to blunt it. It might be in our best interests, actually, to let market forces prevail!” ENTtoday

Gretchen Henkel is a medical writer based in California.

TOP IMAGE SORCE: JUPITERIMAGES

Impact of Fewer Residency Positions

The issue of fewer residency positions is just one of the many pressures transforming both academic and community-based otolaryngology practices. At the University of Cincinnati Academic Health Center, where Myles Pensak, MD, is the H.B. Broidy professor and chair within the Department of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery, resident positions have remained at the same level for three decades, while faculty positions have tripled. The practice uses more PAs and NPs, and faculty pick up more hours because of the 80-hour resident work rule.