Young ER doctors risk their lives on the pandemic’s front lines. But they struggle to find jobs.

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Tue, 2021-01-05 20:07 — mike kraft

Young ER doctors risk their lives on the pandemic’s front lines. But they struggle to find jobs. An unprecedented drop in visits to the emergency department has been ruinous to the job prospects for new doctors. Ben Guarino Washington Post

Owais Durrani does not have a job, a predicament that would have been almost unthinkable for a doctor with his skills a year ago.

At University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, where he is training in emergency medicine, Durrani has treated hundreds of covid-19 patients. He has dosed them with steroids, given them oxygen and carefully turned them onto their bellies to relieve respiratory distress.

“We have been seeing really, really sick people,” he said. He had firsthand experience with the novel coronavirus, too — he caught it in March and recovered after a few feverish days.

Despite all that, the 29-year-old doctor cannot find a company in his hometown of Houston ready to hire him when he graduates next year. Durrani has searched since the summer, “getting on calls with recruiters and hospitals and whatnot,” he said. “And I haven’t locked anything down.”

Like him, many in this class of emergency medicine physicians — young doctors, called residents, who are training in this specialty — are struggling to find full-time employment, even while they work on the front lines treating covid-19 patients.

The dearth of jobs is the result of a domino effect: Many people stayed away from hospital emergency rooms this past year, wary of contracting the virus. As patient numbers dropped, emergency departments brought in less money. As a result, cash-strapped employers stopped recruiting new doctors. ...

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