Shortage of ER Doctors Expected

(December 18, 2008) - Waiting times and treatment in emergency rooms (Read about "Emergency Room") around the country are likely to get longer over the next few years. The reason is a lack of emergency room doctors. The number of physicians with board certification in emergency medicine is unlikely to meet the staffing needs of U.S. emergency departments in the foreseeable future, if ever, according to a study in Academic Emergency Medicine. The study also says that staffing every emergency department with board-certified emergency physicians does not appear to be feasible, given their projections for the field.

"Thousands of emergency departments are not currently staffed by physicians with this type of training," explains Carlos Camargo, MD, DrPH, who led the study. "We questioned whether staffing every department with residency-trained, board-certified emergency physicians - which some individuals have advocated for decades - was a realistic goal. So we set out to estimate emergency physician workforce needs, taking into account the diversity of hospitals across the country and projections about the future physician supply and demand."

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.

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. Under the intermediate-scenario projection, it would not be possible to meet the goal until 2038, and under the worst-case scenario, the goal could never be met. Even if no board-certified emergency physician ever died or retired, 100 percent staffing of all emergency departments with board-certified emergency physicians would not happen for more than a decade.