Medical hospitalists are now found in a significant proportion of hospitals, and is a fast-growing field.

What about other fields? OBs are experimenting with laborists, and there’s some talk about surgical hospitalists.

Emergency physician Shadowfax talks about the success of the surgical hospitalist program at his hospital, saying “they handle the bogus (and unprofitable) trauma cases. They handle the ER and the consults. They free you up to focus on your own patients. And it’s not a bad lifestyle either, for the hospitalsts.”

Unlike medicine, where doctors can survive without hospital responsibilities, surgeons make their living by operating. You’d have to be a large hospital to have enough cases to satisfy both community and in-house surgeons. That fact alone would prevent its spread, unlike other fields where doctors can do just fine focusing on outpatient medicine.

topics: hospitalists, surgeons