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- Aug 9, 2012
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Is this something to be genuinely worried about as a Med student?
It's absolutely not. Finding a job in psychiatry is easier than almost every other field of medicine. I have family/peers in about a dozen different specialties and many of them have such an incredibly different experience with job hunting that I have (i.e. way more restrictions/lack of options). Almost everyone I know is at a minimum in the 250k range for psych (and many around 300k), including in large cities, unless they explicitly wanted to work in a setting that paid less but had perks (VA, county health). That's for working 40 hour/week jobs with minimal call and great lifestyle, provide you actually like being a psychiatrist.
Even for profit systems shifting to add NPs/PAs are very mindful of the branding. Many patients do not like having their critical care being performed by midlevels, even in low health literary areas I have seen patients get upset about this. I currently work somewhere where most of the CAP work is done by PCPs and midlevels due to poor access and I hear multiple times each week a comment like "it's nice to finally see a specialist" which I can only infer is related to my actual discussion of the psychopathology, etiology, and treatment.