Opinion: Requiring a four-year emergency medicine residency is a terrible idea
A proposal to require four years of emergency residency “threatens to burden future residents while failing to meaningfully improve the quality of their education,” an ER doc writes.
Less than two years ago, I completed a three-year emergency medicine residency and, after passing written and oral board exams, became a board-certified emergency physician. Now, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education is claiming that three years of personal and financial sacrifice are not enough.
The ACGME reviews each specialty’s program requirements every 10 years, and it recently released their proposed updates for emergency medicine. Their most notable change? Eliminating the three-year pathway that roughly 80% of programs currently use and mandating an unjustified four-year model. By my math, the change could cost each class of future emergency physicians over $2 billion in cumulative financial loss — including missed income, lost investment growth, and increased debt — and result in a $7.5 billion increase in government payments to hospitals over the next decade.
