How the ABPS Helps Hospital Recruiters
Hospital recruiters who are trying to navigate challenges related to an ongoing physician shortage might be able to find help via the American Board of Physician Specialties (ABPS).
The ABPS believes that qualified primary care physicians with a great deal of emergency department and other hospital experience – a status that particularly applies to rural physicians – should be afforded the opportunity to achieve board certification in a relevant specialty. That is why the ABPS developed and administers the American Board of Hospital Medicine (ABHM) and the Board of Certification in Emergency Medicine (BCEM). These boards exist to provide a platform for qualified physicians who wish to build careers as hospitalists prove that they have mastered the core competencies required to provide the best available care in a hospital setting.
Hospital recruiters can effectively help mitigate the local effects of the nationwide shortage of physicians in emergency departments by seeking to hire primary care physicians with extensive emergency department experience. One potential obstacle to increasing the depth of the talent pool available to some recruiters is a hiring policy that ignores the fact that so many long-time primary care specialists have, in fact, accrued decades of meaningful emergency medicine experience. The fact is, many of these physicians already have performed admirably as de facto hospitalists – and therefore should be considered for hire once they have passed the BCEM and/or ABHM exams.
All Member Boards of the ABPS, including the BCEM and the ABHM, develop their exams under rigorous standards that are comparable to – and in some cases, exceed – those of other established board certifying bodies. Hospital recruiters should note, also, that the advent of online verification of certification credentials makes it simpler than ever to confirm a physician’s status.
In addition, the ABPS provides recruiters a cost-free option for bringing job openings to the attention of ABPS Diplomates by placing free ads in the ABPS career bulletin and the online career center. To find out more about how the ABPS, the BCEM and the ABHM can help relieve some of the issues being faced by hospital recruiters, contact us today.