This year’s Specialty Match Day was highlighted by the addition of four new programs and 13 new fellowship positions for future rheumatologists.
Dr. Beth L. Jonas
For the 2020 appointment year, there were 249 fellowships in rheumatology available, up from 236 in the previous year. It continues a trend of an increasing number of fellowship slots. There were 221 slots available in the 2018 appointment year.
There were 242 slots filled in the 2020 appointment year, up from 233 in the previous year and 218 from two appointment years ago.
“The overall message from the match this year in rheumatology is that it really was a very good, very successful match,” Beth Jonas, MD, chair of the American College of Rheumatology’s Committee on Training and Workforce Issues, said in an interview. “Rheumatology continues to be extremely strong in terms of its ability to attract excellent physicians to the subspecialty, so we are really very, very happy about that.”
She also applauded the addition of the four new programs and 13 new fellowship slots.
“We’ve been working very hard to try and figure out ways to increase slots,” said Dr. Jonas, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She noted that while more needs to be done to address future workforce needs, even the small increases “are meaningful. There is the knowledge out there that there is a workforce shortage in rheumatology. There certainly are a lot of people who would like to become rheumatologists. There is a little bit of a bottleneck here at the level of training slots to get interested and qualified applicants into the match and matched with programs, so we’ve had some marginal increases there.”