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Comment by buildbot | Hacker News Reader

Right, but then half of all med students apply only to derm residency or other lucrative and competitive field with nice hours, leaving us in the situation we are in now where 18% of all emergency med department residencies went unmatched: https://www.aliem.com/mismatch-unfilled-emergency-medicine-r...

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There was rampant expansion of emergency medicine residency spots in the prior years without an associated increase in demand for new EM docs. People noticed the market there and chose to go elsewhere. Also, the unfilled positions are also the low quality ones where your education would be questionable (linked article mentions corporate owned which imo is a red flag).

Emergency med has decent flexibility in terms of hours. The problem was Covid and remote work reduced infections and accidents and heart attacks, and they lost turf to physician assistants manning urgent care centers.

Not during residency, and I have not idea what the second part has to do with the match going underfilled. Are you saying med students saw this phenomena and decided emergency med was best left to PAs, and did not apply to match?

What I heard was emergency departments suffered brutally during covid, and that has had a chilling effect on anyone wanting to go into it. The med students matching now were all rotating through departments during covid.

yes, there are periodic oversupply and undersupply of various medical specialties (just like oil, labor, money, real estate agents), and medical students do react and choose accordingly. ER was hot for a while, and radiology was not so hot for a few years after 2008. Now surprisingly radiology has held up despite AI fears, because of baby boomers starting to get cancer, and ER is down, because private equity went nuts investing in urgent care centers before covid.

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