Chances of working near hometown

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When it comes to being a physician what are the chances of being able to work near and close to your hometown and where you grew up? Chances of being employed by hospital or setting near your hometown?

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If you want to work in a private practice, you can easily get one going in your hometown if you have the resources. In that case, sustainability would be your concern.

If you want to work in a hospital, then it all depends on how they view your resume.
 
If you want to work in a private practice, you can easily get one going in your hometown if you have the resources. In that case, sustainability would be your concern.

If you want to work in a hospital, then it all depends on how they view your resume.

Gotcha but in general how accepting are hospitals of physicians who want to work at the hospital? Like say you apply to hospital for job are you most likely to get that position? Also same with doing residency near hometown? Chances of that?
 
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Gotcha but in general how accepting are hospitals of physicians who want to work at the hospital? Like say you apply to hospital for job are you most likely to get that position? Also same with doing residency near hometown? Chances of that?

It depends on the openings they have. If they don't need more of whatever you are at the time you are applying for a job, that's it.

Residency is different. You apply to a lot of places, interview, rank all the programs, and then an algorithm decides your fate depending on your rank list and program rank lists. Your desire to be in a certain area can be a bonus in where programs rank you, but it's by no means a guarantee that you'll be able to do residency there.
 
It depends on the openings they have. If they don't need more of whatever you are at the time you are applying for a job, that's it.

Residency is different. You apply to a lot of places, interview, rank all the programs, and then an algorithm decides your fate depending on your rank list and program rank lists. Your desire to be in a certain area can be a bonus in where programs rank you, but it's by no means a guarantee that you'll be able to do residency there.

Say for instance you are an anesthesiologist and want to work at hospital very close to your hometown and in hometown. That hospital is in need of anesthesiologists and you apply so than you are 100% chance to be guaranteed that position?
 
Say for instance you are an anesthesiologist and want to work at hospital very close to your hometown and in hometown. That hospital is in need of anesthesiologists and you apply so than you are 100% chance to be guaranteed that position?

No. Presumably there will be other applicants. Not sure why you think a certain job in a certain place at a certain time is a 100% guarantee.
 
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No. Presumably there will be other applicants. Not sure why you think a certain job in a certain place at a certain time is a 100% guarantee.

but what are the chances in that scenario? Also if you tell hospital that is your hometown and you would love to work in hometown setting compared to other settings. Would they keep that in mind!
 
but what are the chances in that scenario? Also if you tell hospital that is your hometown and you would love to work in hometown setting compared to other settings. Would they keep that in mind!

Depends on how good of an applicant you are. If you are the best applicant going into your field, then your chances of ending up in a particular city is pretty high. If you have sub-average board scores and are an otherwise meh applicant, your chances drop. It also heavily depends on what specialty as some of the sub-specialties only take 1-2 residents per year. Internal Medicine or Pediatrics may take dozens every year. We of course take into consideration where people are from. We want people excited to be at where we are. By the same token, especially for major cities, there are plenty of people that simply don't care that they are far away from home, so competition goes up.


If you want to work in a private practice, you can easily get one going in your hometown if you have the resources. In that case, sustainability would be your concern.

If you want to work in a hospital, then it all depends on how they view your resume.

You need to learn the difference between inpatient vs. outpatient and academic vs. private. Hospital is NOT the 'opposite' of private practice.
 
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but what are the chances in that scenario? Also if you tell hospital that is your hometown and you would love to work in hometown setting compared to other settings. Would they keep that in mind!
Um I think you want people to say "no problem you can go work anywhere you want". That's just not real life. For every one of us who landed a good job we wanted there were a dozens of other people who didn't get that spot. How competitive things are will be geographically and specialty and facility dependent. Right now certain cities are pretty saturated in some specialties while other cities are actively recruiting in others. And all this will flip flop back and forth over time. So nobody can tell you you'll have good odds or not. All you can do is put together a good CV and hope there are openings when you ultimately are interviewing.
 
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It depends entirely on your specialty, if the hospital/region needs that specialty, and if you're the best applicant for the job, that's assuming you're not in a specialty that you can try to open your own practice and take your chances.
 
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I was curious about this too. If you do a residency somewhere, are chances high that they will keep you for your full time job once you finish if you want to continue working there? Or do you just have the same chances as anyone else applying for the position?
What is the application process like for a doctor? Like any other job? Fill out an application and go in for an interview?

I've noticed when looking at hospital websites that they don't have openings for physicians listed with the other jobs in the hospital. I'm not sure if the process for hiring physicians is completely separate from nurses/etc.?
 
I was curious about this too. If you do a residency somewhere, are chances high that they will keep you for your full time job once you finish if you want to continue working there? Or do you just have the same chances as anyone else applying for the position?
What is the application process like for a doctor? Like any other job? Fill out an application and go in for an interview?

I've noticed when looking at hospital websites that they don't have openings for physicians listed with the other jobs in the hospital. I'm not sure if the process for hiring physicians is completely separate from nurses/etc.?
Let's say a program trains a dozen residents a year. The number of attendings that are hired by that program may be, say, 2-3. And they won't all be home grown. Obviously most aren't getting a job there. So no. In most cases you will be job seeking elsewhere.

Doctors do have job listings in the specialty publications and boards, not usually on the hospital websites. Often jobs are filled by networking and word of mouth though. And yes you will be interviewing for your job.
 
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I just feel like it is different interviewing for a job that you may already have multiple years of experience in, unless being an attending is drastically different than late residency
 
I just feel like it is different interviewing for a job that you may already have multiple years of experience in, unless being an attending is drastically different than late residency

You don't have "multiple years of experience" in being an attending as a resident.
 
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I just feel like it is different interviewing for a job that you may already have multiple years of experience in, unless being an attending is drastically different than late residency
Places aren't training residents because they have the demand for that many doctors. It's a pyramid structure -- you only need a few attendings to oversee a lot of residents. If you had that many openings you would not want to work there -- something is very wrong if there's that kind of turn over. So no, residency isn't an audition for a future job in most cases. It's something that maybe happens on very rare occasion. I can only think of a few people I've ever met who stayed on from their residency, and a few more who came back years later, after additional training elsewhere.

Being an attending is definitely different than being a resident. And it's hard to be seen as an authority figure at a place where everyone already knows you as the underling. And many places want to cross pollinate their programs by bringing in people who trained elsewhere. but mostly it's about capacity -- there's never going to be that many job openings where you trained to keep many of those who trained there. I sure wouldn't bank on it -- it's rare. Your odds of working there as an attending are probably much better training at a program elsewhere.
 
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Places aren't training residents because they have the demand for that many doctors. It's a pyramid structure -- you only need a few attendings to oversee a lot of residents. If you had that many openings you would not want to work there -- something is very wrong if there's that kind of turn over. So no, residency isn't an audition for a future job in most cases. It's something that maybe happens on very rare occasion. I can only think of a few people I've ever met who stayed on from their residency, and a few more who came back years later, after additional training elsewhere.

Being an attending is definitely different than being a resident. And it's hard to be seen as an authority figure at a place where everyone already knows you as the underling. And many places want to cross pollinate their programs by bringing in people who trained elsewhere. but mostly it's about capacity -- there's never going to be that many job openings where you trained to keep many of those who trained there. I sure wouldn't bank on it -- it's rare. Your odds of working there as an attending are probably much better training at a program elsewhere.

Maybe it's just my hospital, but most of the attendings were once residents in the same program (this is EM, if it matters). But I think currently only 2 "matriculated" directly from 4th year to attending.
 
Maybe it's just my hospital, but most of the attendings were once residents in the same program (this is EM, if it matters). But I think currently only 2 "matriculated" directly from 4th year to attending.

Some institutions inbreed heavily, but just because most of the attendings at an institution came from the same institution doesn't mean that most of the residents at that institution became attendings there.
 
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Some institutions inbreed heavily, but just because most of the attendings at an institution came from the same institution doesn't mean that most of the residents at that institution became attendings there.
Exactly. If they hire 1-2 a year from a class of 12, over time there will be a lot of homegrown attendings. But 90% of residents will not have been hired.
 
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...But I think currently only 2 "matriculated" directly from 4th year to attending.

It is less uncommon to hire a former resident who had addition training (fellowship) and achievements elsewhere to come back. This falls into the cross pollination pattern I described above. This is very different than being offered a job out of residency to stay on. They are recruiting you more for that interval training than your stellar residency performance. And you are going to interview for that job like an outsider. But again, if they have residency classes of, say, 10-12 residents, and maybe hire somebody who got some training/fellowship elsewhere back every couple of years, it still means they aren't extending this opportunity to most.

The prior poster wanted to know if he might stay on as an attending after residency, and I still assert that's pretty rare as well as numerically impossible for programs to keep that many. Don't bank on it -- it's not the normal career path. I've worked/trained at a couple of places now over a lot of years, and I've only met three people who became attendings at the same place after residency, without additional training in between (and all 3 were at different institutions). That's low single digit percentage odds, and I'm not even sure they all view this as where they will stay longterm.
 
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I was curious about this too. If you do a residency somewhere, are chances high that they will keep you for your full time job once you finish if you want to continue working there? Or do you just have the same chances as anyone else applying for the position?
What is the application process like for a doctor? Like any other job? Fill out an application and go in for an interview?

I've noticed when looking at hospital websites that they don't have openings for physicians listed with the other jobs in the hospital. I'm not sure if the process for hiring physicians is completely separate from nurses/etc.?

Yes it is different from the other hospital jobs pager hat hires nurses and techs, etc. from my understanding a hospital generally doesn't actually hire that many physicians. At the hospital I work at the physicians each have their own specialty private practice groups (eg. XX Mountain Anesthesia, or XX surgical associates) and they contract with the hospital to provide their services. The hiring is done by the private groups depending on the groups needs.

I know this isn't how all specialties work and any of the residents of attendings here are free to correct me if I'm wrong. This is just what I have observed and gathered from conversations with the docs
 
Yes it is different from the other hospital jobs pager hat hires nurses and techs, etc. from my understanding a hospital generally doesn't actually hire that many physicians. At the hospital I work at the physicians each have their own specialty private practice groups (eg. XX Mountain Anesthesia, or XX surgical associates) and they contract with the hospital to provide their services. The hiring is done by the private groups depending on the groups needs.

I know this isn't how all specialties work and any of the residents of attendings here are free to correct me if I'm wrong. This is just what I have observed and gathered from conversations with the docs
Some hospitals absolutely contract out to groups in some or all departments. This has been a popular model. But with changes in reimbursement we are actually seeing a reversal in course and going forward I expect more doctors to become hospital employees. That being said, your typical Hospital HR department isn't going to know what to look for in hiring a doctor in any specialty and so you just won't ever see those jobs posted on the hospital job board.
 
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@Fuarky Much of the answer to your question is "it depends". If you grew up in a major metropolitan area and want to work within 15 miles of your childhood home, that may be very possible, particularly if there are a number of hospitals/practice settings in that area and you choose a medical specialty that is in short supply in that area.

If you grew up in a rural area and you choose to go into primary care, there is a good chance there will be a job for you within 50 miles of where you grew up. If, on the other hand, you go to the big city for medical school, fall in love with a super-sub-specialty and want to go back, you may have a challenge as there may not be enough work for you within a reasonable commuting distance of your hospital because of the low population. You will either have a more general practice (e.g. general ortho rather than hand surgery, general pediatrics rather than pediatric nephrology) or need /want to live in a more densely populated area.

An additional issue that is hard to predict the further in the future we project is the medical malpractice situation in a given region. If you are in a high risk specialty, there may be areas where you might not dare to practice.
 
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Where does this pre-med mind-set come from where they think that just because you want X, that the people making the decision of your coming to X are more inclined to take you, when everybody wants to come to X?????

Gotcha but in general how accepting are hospitals of physicians who want to work at the hospital? Like say you apply to hospital for job are you most likely to get that position? Also same with doing residency near hometown? Chances of that?
 
Another analogy is that while a research lab(s) may have lots of post-doc positions, the institute where they work at may not be hiring research faculty.

I've been told by a number of clinical colleagues that many doctors will go into practice near where they do their residencies. Is this true?

Places aren't training residents because they have the demand for that many doctors. It's a pyramid structure -- you only need a few attendings to oversee a lot of residents. If you had that many openings you would not want to work there -- something is very wrong if there's that kind of turn over. So no, residency isn't an audition for a future job in most cases. It's something that maybe happens on very rare occasion. I can only think of a few people I've ever met who stayed on from their residency, and a few more who came back years later, after additional training elsewhere.

Being an attending is definitely different than being a resident. And it's hard to be seen as an authority figure at a place where everyone already knows you as the underling. And many places want to cross pollinate their programs by bringing in people who trained elsewhere. but mostly it's about capacity -- there's never going to be that many job openings where you trained to keep many of those who trained there. I sure wouldn't bank on it -- it's rare. Your odds of working there as an attending are probably much better training at a program elsewhere.
 
Where does this pre-med mind-set come from where they think that just because you want X, that the people making the decision of your coming to X are more inclined to take you, when everybody wants to come to X?????
Yeah, you don't really meet too many job applicants who aren't going to say "I really want to come work here"...
 
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I've been told by a number of clinical colleagues that many doctors will go into practice near where they do their residencies. Is this true?

Sort of. Many who do 3-7 years of residency in a location put down roots, so when they look for jobs, naturally they pore over the local ones first. And they may know local clinicians through the hospital which can be a form of networking. But thats different than saying you need to do a residency in a particular region to get a job there.
 
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