Many people don’t give much thought to what goes on in hospitals. Often, they represent a stressful, miserable place, reserved for some of the scariest times in our lives. But some doctors devote their entire careers to work in hospitals, and you may never have even heard of them.
A career in medicine is fundamentally different from any other, and it’s fascinating to analyze what makes up a doctor. And the life of a hospitalist is another matter entirely. For starters, this infographic defines what a hospitalist is: a physician whose primary focus is the general medical care of patients admitted to the hospital.
There are 44,000 hospitalists in the United States. The standard path to a hospitalist career is to complete a family medicine, internal medicine, or pediatric residency, and that hard work can pay off; adult hospitalists make an average of $290,089 per year, while pediatric hospitalists make an average of $225,588 per year.
It’s not a breeze, though; hospitalists have a punishing schedule, with an average workweek of seven days on, seven days off, and an average 42 hours worked per week, in the form of seven 12-hour shifts. It’s a high stress job, with a high volume of patients- an average of 16 adults patients or 14 pediatric patients get seen per day. Yet, the most intense jobs are often the most rewarding, and for sheer variety of work, you can’t beat a hospitalist job.