How many doctors?

by reestheskin on 24/02/2017

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People who make predictions of how many doctors or even what specific type of doctor we need in (say) 20 years are IMHO generally deluded. Or they are telling fibs. Or selling something. The following is from the NEJM and is about ‘hospitalists’

Twenty years ago, we described the emergence of a new type of specialist that we called a “hospitalist.”. Since then, the number of hospitalists has grown from a few hundred to more than 50,000 — making this new field substantially larger than any subspecialty of internal medicine (the largest of which is cardiology, with 22,000 physicians), about the same size as pediatrics (55,000), and in fact larger than any specialty except general internal medicine (109,000) and family medicine (107,000). Approximately 75% of U.S. hospitals, including all highly ranked academic health centers, now have hospitalists. The field’s rapid growth has both reflected and contributed to the evolution of clinical practice over the past two decades.

The only way you can play ‘make believe’ like the DoH and all the NHS ‘experts’ so keen to trample all over our medical students’ futures is if you think Stalin is still alive and sorting out the tractor numbers.