Match Day Celebrates Biggest Numbers Ever (Physician / Specialty matching)
Source: Medpage Today
WASHINGTON -- As medical students all around the country opened envelopes on Friday containing their future for the next several years, they were part of the biggest residency Match Day in history.
A total of 37,103 applicants applied for 33,167 positions, the most ever offered in the match, according to the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP), the organization that coordinates Match Day. Of the available positions, 96.2% were filled, up 0.2% from last year. The number of available first-year positions rose to 30,232, an increase of 1,383 over 2017, the NRMP noted in a press release.
In terms of specialties, the big winners this year were Integrated Interventional Radiology, Neurological Surgery, Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, and Thoracic Surgery, which all filled every one of their available positions. The losers? Mostly preliminary 1-year residency programs, including Ob/gyn (52.4% of slots filled), Surgery (65.2%), and pediatrics (73.7%). Medicine-Dermatology, which was not a 1-year program, filled 83.3% of its slots. Of the low-filling specialties, the 1-year Surgery programs dwarfed all the others in size, at 1,363 slots offered, while the other programs had 21 or fewer positions available.
Although primary care residencies filled well overall -- at 96.7% for Family Medicine and 97.6% for Internal Medicine -- "they're not filling with as many U.S. allopathic medical school seniors as more competitive specialties, often the surgical specialties," which is consistent with previous years, Mona Signer, the NRMP's president and CEO, told MedPage Today in a phone interview. "It probably has at least something to do with compensation; surgical specialties pay much more than primary care specialties."
Read more: https://www.medpagetoday.com/publichealthpolicy/medicaleducation/71824
LeftInTX
(25,380 posts)Very interesting!
orleans
(34,060 posts)i had no idea there was such a thing.