Why hasn't the lack of midlevels in AP kept us in demand?

[Zarniwoop]

In med school, I thought specialties where mid-levels function at the close to the same level as MD's were in jeopardy.

• -Nurse anesthetists do most of the toughest cases, so who needs anesthesiologists?
• -Nurse practitioners do everything a family doc does, so who needs family docs?
• -PA's do most everything a dermatologist does, so who needs dermatologists?
• -Etc.

I thought pathologists don't (at least in AP until the machines take over everything) have other people trying to do our job, so we will be safe.

Overthinking like this got me into our sorry specialty.

How do these other fields keep their demand strong when there are mid-levels who can do their job? The dermatology gods might keep their own numbers down, but they don't have control over the number of PA's, nurses, etc who graduate every year.

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[WEBB PINKERTON]

The distance from patients is too great in pathology.

 

[Mad Jack]

When you need 300 pathologists a year and you're graduating over 500, you don't need midlevels to drive demand down- you've already got a surplus of physicians without them.

 

[JeSuisPathology]

Oddly enough, one of our trainees mentioned last week that the clinical instructor is the new mid-level of pathology. Certain prestigious institutions have been employing this model for many years now, it is just in recent times that other institutions have been following suit.

 

[Zarniwoop]

Oddly enough, one of our trainees mentioned last week that the clinical instructor is the new mid-level of pathology. Certain prestigious institutions have been employing this model for many years now, it is just in recent times that other institutions have been following suit.

I guess except for the diminishing pool of pathologists who make a good living, the rest of us ought to consider ourselves as over-educated mid-levels.

 

[coroner]

This is a non sequitur. First off, all those specialties you mentioned with midlevels did not plunge into some kind of recession as some people were scared of 10-15 yrs ago. Ask any PCP, gas, or derm and they'll have a plethora of job opportunities coming out of residency or if they wanted to move to a new city. Hypothetically speaking, if there were such midlevels in pathology to act as a buffer, then it's plausible the field could even be worse. But, when the market is already tight to begin with, eliminating non-existent economic factors isn't necessarily the solution to improve it. It's like asking why aren't more people buying oranges when there's no tangerine trees around: because people didn't want that many oranges in the first place...

 

[WEBB PINKERTON]

I guess if you start seeing midlevels, you can interpret that as a good sign. The market demanded a midlevel practioner due to pathologists not being able to handle all the work.