Can someone here enlighten me as to what ID docs end up doing long-term? What kinds of patients do they see and what is the lifestyle like? I know a lot of docs do lab research if they are in academia... is there a lot of clinical research as well?
There are probably several individuals who can answer this much more completely than I can, but since no one has replied as of yet, I will give it a shot. I had the opportunity to work with the Infectious Diseases Consult Service for a couple of months. I am a Pharmacy Practice Resident at a large, academic medical center, so my perspective is certainly not what you will get from an IM Resident or ID fellow.
Basically, at the institution I work at, the ID docs do a wide variety of things. Primarily, they have an excellent consult service where they receive requests from other services who are caring for patients that have infectious complications that warrant a higher level of expertise. Every day, the fellow would get the new consults for the day, and spend the morning working all of these patients up. In the afternoon, we would round; the team consisted of the Attending ID Doc, the fellow, the ID Nurse Practitioner, one of the ID Pharmacists, and one to two Internal Medicine Residents. They would see each patient, make recommendations as they saw fit, and follow up daily until they felt they could sign off the case.
They also have an ID clinic where most of these complex patients have their follow up appointments.
Our hospital's Epidemiologist is an ID specialist who came from the CDC. He works with infection control, gives talks on investigating potential outbreaks, and probably has several other responsibilities in his role.
Next, our hospital has an antimicrobial management program, which one of the ID Attendings heads up along with one of the ID Pharmacists. They basically manage the restricted antimicrobial formulary on a day to day basis.
Finally, one of the fellows finished up the program, and decided he wanted to get away from academic medicine. He took a position as head of Infectious Diseases at a small community hospital, which will allow him to set up his own practice. His service to the hospital will probably be consult based, he will schedule follow up appointments for complicated patients, and will be able to manage the entire institution's antibiotic use to limit resistance.
This post is longer than I intended, but my point is that ID docs do A lot of different things, in all types of practice settings. Things I failed to mention were the ID Transplant service, the ID Attending that does most of his work out of the microbiology lab, and the HIV specialists. I cannot comment on the lifestyle, but ID is definitely exciting, you see something new everyday, and get to work with most services in any institution.
I hope this gives you something to work with.
