The Infectious Disease Society of America has announced the success of a program it jointly developed in 2017 aimed at drawing more physicians into the field and building a strong path to retain more of them in positions at the public health level.
As a whole, residency matches for the infectious disease specializing physicians were down in 2023, but the field also severely lacks infectious disease experts in the public health realm.
Around 80% of counties in the U.S. do not even have a single infectious disease physician. Part of the issue, IDSA notes in its announcement, is that "few established career development pathways exist for ID physicians interested in working with public health departments."
The need for improving headcount in the profession and collaboration across the public health sector is the impetus behind the Leaders in Epidemiology, Antimicrobial Stewardship and Public Health (LEAP) Fellowship. The program is a one-year training model that IDSA says has effectively proven to foster collaboration and career development pathways for early-career infectious disease physicians, senior leadership, and public health departments.
Research on the LEAP Fellowship, published Jan. 24 in Clinical Infectious Diseases, found that after the one-year program, "nearly all LEAP graduates continue to collaborate with public health departments while remaining clinically active, many with medical leadership positions," according to the press release.
Funded by the CDC and jointly led by the IDSA and Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America, and the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society, the model for it was developed in 2017 and is now being used to build frameworks for similar fellowship programs.
A "soon-to-launch" combined fellowship focusing on infectious diseases and epidemic intelligence service is also in the works according to the write-up in Clinical Infectious Diseases, however, the authors of the research on LEAP note that even the new fellowship "can only address a fraction" of the growing need for infectious disease physicians across the U.S.