Most radiation oncology fellows will go on to hold jobs in academic radiology, according to a report published this week in the International Journal of Radiation Oncology • Biology • Physics. And more than a third of trainees in pediatrics or brachytherapy go on to hold jobs where those fellowship skills aren’t valued.
Radiation oncology fellowships have grown in popularity over the past decade, first author Osama Mohamad, MD, PhD, and co-authors wrote in the journal—but programs have failed to adequately document the employment outcomes of their graduates as they've expanded.
“With no Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education accreditation for RO fellowships, fellowship data are difficult to capture,” Mohamad, of the department of radiation oncology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, and colleagues wrote. “We achieved a response from 100 percent of RO training programs, and review of the 2006-2017 radiation oncology fellowship graduates’ current employment revealed several interesting findings.”
Mohamad and his team reached out to 94 radiation oncology (RO) residency programs via questionnaires, web searches and direct contact with fellowship programs. They based their findings on the jobs currently held by fellowship grads, since it would be difficult to obtain employment history for each candidate.
Of 94 residency programs, just 19—20 percent—reported having fellowship training, the authors said. A total of 142 fellows were identified, the majority of whom graduated from U.S. residencies and were serving in academic settings. Sixty-nine percent of all graduates were affiliated with an academic university system.
“This is compared with 40 percent of American Society for Radiation Oncology membership that are employed by academic university systems, or 25 to 40 percent of graduating residents accepting academic jobs,” Mohamad et al. wrote.
RO graduates were also more likely to be hired by an institution different than the one that housed their fellowship program, with just 13 percent of former fellows employed by the same practice. Thirty-seven percent of pediatrics and brachytherapy fellowship graduates held jobs “in which they did not seem to be practicing using these skills.”
The authors said their analysis is a preliminary one, since limitations include the fact that their data are mostly self-reported by fellowship programs or found with an online search, subjecting the research to bias. The team didn’t account for quality when assessing fellowships, either, they said.
“Importantly, these data do not address the motivation for pursuing a fellowship, nor the satisfaction of fellowship graduates with their additional training, nor the readiness of residency graduates in these areas of subspecialization, nor the ‘quality’ or quantity of job offers after fellowship,” Mohamad and co-authors wrote. “In the setting of well-documented residency and fellowship expansion, RO geographic maldistribution and a potential looming oversupply of radiation oncologists, further study of the motivation for fellowship training in RO would be of interest.”
After graduating from Indiana University-Bloomington with a bachelor’s in journalism, Anicka joined TriMed’s Chicago team in 2017 covering cardiology. Close to her heart is long-form journalism, Pilot G-2 pens, dark chocolate and her dog Harper Lee.