Jarrod Shapiro, DPM
Residency Interviews: More Than Meets the Eye

Residency interviews ended last week and the residency programs have completed their rankings. For most applicants, as well as their colleges, this is a very stressful time, waiting – hoping – to hear they ranked with their program of choice. But for some of them, their hopes will not come true. A recent communication from the Council on Teaching Hospitals (COTH) helped to provide some perspective on the situation. Here's a short infographic for your consideration.

According to Jeffrey Robbins, DPM, chair of the Council on Teaching Hospitals, the current 2015 CASPR Program statistics are as follows:

This graph demonstrates some interesting features about this year's residency applicant numbers.

First, there are only 16 active unfilled residency positions. This means that of the approved residency positions, there are only 16 spots in residencies that for various reasons are choosing not to fill their spots. This may occur for several reasons, such as a residency not desiring to dilute its numbers with more residents, programs unable to attain the funding necessary to pay another resident, or lack of sponsor hospital administrative support, among others.

Second, this year 86 applicants were folks who did not receive a program from prior years. These are essentially the hold-overs from years' past. That's a good number of people. I think it would be informative for the COTH to do an analysis of these 86 people and find out why they didn't match.

We often talk about these numbers with the assumption that if there were enough positions for all applicants, then all applicants would get programs. However, that's not necessarily true. Some portion of these 86 people might just not be residency material. Would it not be helpful to figure out exactly what occurred to prevent these unlucky people from previously attaining their goals?

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Third, if you remove the applicants from prior years who did not receive positions (the 86 number mentioned above) we would have 553 applicants for 576 positions. Without the prior year's applicants there would be no short fall. We would have enough residency positions for all of our graduates (barely enough, mind you).

Now this doesn't mean the profession should not continue its goal to create more residency positions to reach the 110% number.

Fourth, and finally (sadly), we currently have a short fall of 63 people. What will these folks do while waiting for next year's residency interviews? One can only guess.

I'd like to take some editorial license to make one final comment as a faculty member of the newest podiatry college, Western University College of Podiatric Medicine (WUCPM). Some have said in the past that the short fall is a result of this newest college and our extra students. If you think that, you're wrong. First, the 2015 graduating class from this college will have about 31 students in it. That's less than half the short fall number. Numbers don't add up do they? Are you going to blame the Midwestern College next as the second most recent school? Seems ridiculous. Second, these students are all strong, and if WUCPM did not exist, they would have graduated from another college, and the overall numbers would be unchanged.

My point here is that we should stop pointing fingers and figure out legitimate ways to solve our problems together.

Here's the problem.

Ready?

Hold your breath...

Make more residency programs. Podiatry is an incredibly underrepresented medical specialty, especially when it comes to the academic arena. It is only recently that almost all of the colleges have become affiliated with larger universities (to our benefit). However, residency education in major academic teaching institutions remains poorly represented. Does Johns Hopkins have a podiatry program? How about Baylor? Go down the list, and you'll find an unfortunately shallow pool of teaching institutions with a podiatric residency housed directly within it (rather than some tenuous affiliation in name only).

There are so many teaching hospitals that are suffering from a lack of podiatric representation, and they don't even know it. Some real strides have been made recently in developing residency programs, and I hope the powers that be don't lose their steam.

A rational approach to all aspects of this problem, coupled with a will to keep making progress, will only benefit the profession and those trying hard to become our next generation of podiatric colleagues.

Best wishes,

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