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Are there opportunities outside of the academic sector for anesthesiologists to be full time SICU docs?
maude said:Are there opportunities outside of the academic sector for anesthesiologists to be full time SICU docs?
Carm said:It is true about salaries right now. This is why there are no takers for CC fellowship slots. You never know about the future however. There is a lot of data that show better outcomes with a closed unit. Many surgeons (hospital cash cows) are getting very comfortable with an expert (full time critical care doc in closed unit) managing their patients. If this trend catches on there may be an increased demand for SICU attendings. Just like eveything else, if there is a demand, there is cash to be made.
Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to claim that monetarily this is definitely the way to go, but who knows in the future. One of our CA-3's is doing CC fellowship next year and he threw out some obscene number like 23 slots out of 200 filled early in the game. I can't verify this beyond word of mouth, but interesting.
jetproppilot said:Nice post that I happen to agree with, which will leave MilMD sittin' pretty.
Current day in areas that have high medicare ratios (read:low reimbursement) hospitals are augmenting anesthesia groups with large amounts of cash in order to maintain a well liked/stable/workhorse anesthesia group. They know cash is the determining factor, and if you put-cash-out, they'll come.
I think that'll happen in ICUs too.
Business savvy hospitals are willing to lose money in one arena (i.e. anesthesiologist salaries) in order to more-then-make-up-their-loss in other arenas (attracting surgeons who bring patients to said hospital where said patients occupy hospital beds post-op, utilize laboratory for testing, profit on medicines/invasive&noninvasive studies/family members who eat at cafeteria etc etc