As COVID-19 shifts into becoming an endemic virus in the U.S. and other infectious diseases such as Candida auris begin to emerge, what can help improve a shortage of infectious disease doctors?
Louisiana State Health Officer Dr. Joe Kanter talked about it this week with WWL’s Newell Normand.
Newell speaks with Dr. Joe Kanter, Louisiana State Health Officer, about the lack of infectious disease doctors, the latest on Monkey Pox, and the commercialization of COVID vaccines and therapeutics.
“ID is one of the specialties that… in the past year or two has not matched all of the available spots, and that's a change,” Kanter said.
According to data from the National Resident Matching Program, around 56% of infections disease programs were filled for appointment year 2023, compared to 79% of overall programs.
Kanter explained that the field typically attracts “very intelligent individuals, very intellectual individuals,” who are required to go through additional training.
“Well, one of the challenges with ID is these folks work very hard and, you know, they’re not drawing the salaries of some other specialties,” he said. “I think if you talk to folks in the field, they’ll tell you they’re incredibly burnt out coming out of the pandemic.”
These specialists tended to bear the brunt of the public backlash associated with COVID-19 and they have been overworked, Kanter said.
This possibly contributed to the slip in popularity for the specialty.
However, infectious disease doctors are “vital to what a hospital does,” according to Kanter.
“There’s this challenge in medicine where if a doc is in a specialty that does a lot of procedures – you know, think of an interventional cardiologist or a surgeon – those are reimbursed at a very high level. If they’re in a specialty whose expertise primarily is intellectual, like infectious disease, the reimbursement isn’t always commensurate with that,” he explained.
Kanter also said the residency system for doctors is “convoluted” and lacking in strategy.
“We’re seeing it kind of come apart in various ways,” he said, adding that emergency medicine also had unmatched spots this year. In order to fix the shortage, the residency system needs to be improved, Kanter argued.
“Bring this residency match system into something that actually is responsive to what the needs are, which really hasn’t been done in that manner before, I don't think,” he said.
Listen to the full conversation here.
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