CHICAGO - If help wanted ads are any indicator, the demand for interventional radiologists has risen dramatically in the past five years, especially in California and the Midwest. Then again, maybe these specialists are just retiring earlier.
During Wednesday's RSNA health policy sessions, Dr. Anne Covey of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City said help wanted data showed the interventional radiology market has made enormous gains from a low point in 1995, especially in private practice.
"The demand for interventional radiologists is increasing, and will continue to increase in the future," Covey said. "This kind of information is important not only for radiologists who are planning their careers and for individual departments -- both academic and private practices for planning future staffing -- but also at an organizational level for planning the future of the organization itself," she said.
The researchers looked at all of the help wanted ads for radiologists published in Radiology and the American Journal of Roentgenology, coded by practice type, geographic location by region, and subspecialty, for three time periods: 1991-1994, 1995-1998, and 1999. Positions for interventional radiologists were then compared with those for other types of radiologists. Both full and part-time positions were included, and practice type, such as academic, military or private practice, was also noted.
Study limitations included the nature of help wanted ads, which don't show every position available, and the fact that the data are not very time-specific -- a job advertised today might not be available for three to six months, Covey said.
In the nine years of data collection there were over 17,000 advertised positions for diagnostic radiologists. Thirteen percent of them, or 2,270, were specifically for interventional radiologists. While just 10% of the ads between 1991 and 1994 were for interventional radiologists, the figure jumped to 16% in 1995-1998, and leveled off at 14% in 1999.
"There has been an absolute and relative trend toward private practice. In the first time period, 60% of the jobs were for academic positions, this dropped significantly to 41% for the second time period, and now to 36% in 1999," Covey said. "In addition, we found that the trends in the academic job market tend to lag several months behind private practice."
Geographically, there was a trend away from the Northeast and South and toward the Midwest. California saw a decrease in other radiologic subspecialties but an increase in interventional radiology positions. Covey said the higher demand might be attributable to increasing patient awareness of minimally invasive procedures, and to their acceptance by managed care payers looking to trim costs.
Covey hopes to include Internet job postings in future assessments, but tracking is difficult because those positions are not automatically archived.
"Another area we'd like to look at in the future is whether interventional radiologists as compared to other radiologists tend to retire earlier -- either because of the time commitment, the radiation exposure, or the physical demands of wearing lead all day."
By Eric
Barnes
AuntMinnie.com staff writer
November 30, 2000
Copyright © 2000 AuntMinnie.com
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