The Podiatric Residency Shortage:
What YOU Can Do?

Unless you’re living in a hole, you have heard that there is a residency shortage for the upcoming graduating podiatric classes. H. David Gottlieb, DPM reported in PM News October 25, 2010 #3,992 that last year, "there were 12 more graduates than there were available entry-level residency positions. This year the estimated number is 60" and may go as high as 80. Since all but 6 states now require a residency to practice, some view this as a crisis. I view this as an opportunity. First of all, this doesn’t mark the end of podiatry as a specialty. As our more senior podiatrists will tell you, we’ve been through residency shortages in the past and managed to survive. I see this as an opportunity for all of us to come together behind a common cause and make podiatry a more viable profession than ever. That means you, too, APMA and ACFAS.  Kiss and make up so we can move beyond the petty partisanship. When groups differ, the best way to make progress is to find common ground. Well, here it is. Your children – the students and residents – are at stake. Enough said.

	Tonight's Premier Lecture is Hallux Limitus by Jay Lieberman, DPM, FACFAS

Enough said again. I did title this editorial “What YOU Can Do” about the residency shortage. I’m now talking to you, the podiatrist in practice, rounding at the hospital, going through your day treating patients.  Yes, there is something you can and should do to help with this problem. I’ve listed below just a few suggestions for those of you who would like to participate and help our profession’s leaders do something about the potential residency shortage.

1. Get involved. This isn’t someone else’s problem. It’s yours. You may be happily ensconced in practice, busily treating patients. “I don’t have time to be involved,” you say? Well, my answer is, you can’t afford to be uninvolved. Let’s make it simple: not enough residencies leads to students not applying to podiatric medical schools, means eventually less residents, which leads to fewer podiatrists, which leads to diminishing power to effect governmental change, which means loss of rights and privileges, etc., until eventually no more podiatry.  Pretty clear? I hope so. What do you do? Look below.


2. Contact your alma mater or closest podiatric medical school. Ask them what you can do to help. Get involved with teaching. Interested in research?  Work with your university to create quality research projects.  Better research leads to higher profiles and everything positive that comes with it. Donate money to your podiatric medical school(s) of choice. We all need money. Money allows everything else to follow.


3. Create a residency program (or at least get involved with one). Ever thought of creating a residency? Stop thinking and do it. Not sure what to do?  The APMA has resources to help. Alternatively, call a nearby residency for help or speak to your friends. Another choice is to ask your podiatric medical school when you call them to get involved. If you create a residency or even affiliate yourself with one, you’re providing more resources to our current pool. Every patient you see and every surgery you do would be a potential learning experience for a resident. The residency shortage will be a supply-side rather than demand-side problem, so the greater number of clinical experiences (both surgical and nonsurgical) we can provide, the greater our supply. 


4. Pool our resources. As a podiatric community, our members need to pool our resources. If you’re involved with a residency, contact the other residencies in your area and discuss how you can share resources. For example, if a residency faculty member is an authority on EBM, schedule an inter-residency series where all the residents in the area can benefit from that person’s expertise. The same benefits would be seen by resource pooling for research studies. Think about all those small retrospective case series that abound in the podiatric literature. How much better would our literature be if we pooled our resources and created larger prospective studies that involved several residencies and/or large numbers of podiatrists? Administrative duties, surgical case numbers, maximizing attending skills. The benefits go on and on. 
5. Advertise podiatry. We keep hearing podiatry is the best kept secret in medicine (which is true), but the problem is, it’s still a secret. Why is it that of the students I interview, most of them have heard of podiatry late in their college career as an alternative to DO or MD degrees? The reason is that we aren’t doing an effective job marketing the career. We can’t leave it up to the APMA and our state organizations alone to do the marketing. We all need to pony up the time and effort to educate the population about podiatry, so we can have large numbers of highly qualified applicants. It’s time to let the secret out of the closet.

It’s on all of us together to solve the residency shortage problem. Assuming someone else will do the job won’t get this job done. Let’s take the residency shortage as a challenge and an opportunity to move the entire profession forward. Let’s make it feast, not famine.

Keep writing in with your thoughts and comments. Better yet, post them in our eTalk forum. Best wishes.

Jarrod Shapiro, DPM
PRESENT Practice Perfect Editor
[email protected]

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