Pediatrician

Pediatrician: a physician who is concerned with the physical, emotional, and social health of children from birth to young adulthood.

Pediatricians provide a wide range of services from preventive health care to the diagnosis and treatment of both acute and chronic ailments.

Quick Facts

Competitiveness: Moderate

Length of training: 3 years

Number of residency programs: 198

Number of residents in training: 8,145

Number in U.S. currently Board Certified in specialty: 60,649

First year median compensation: $110,000

Mean number of hours per week in patient care activities: 49.5

Residency Information

You will complete a 3 year residency in pediatrics, where you must also complete rotations in general pediatrics, newborn care and selected subspecialty areas.

You can spend upto 3 years completing a fellowship in the following areas:

• Adolescent Medicine
• Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics
• Hospice and Palliative Medicine
• Medical Toxicology
• Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine
Neurodevelopmental Disabilities
• Pediatric Cardiology
• Pediatric Critical Care Medicine
• Pediatric Emergency Medicine
• Pediatric Endocrinology
• Pediatric Gastroenterology
• Pediatric Hematology-Oncology
• Pediatric Infectious Diseases
• Pediatric Nephrology
• Pediatric Pulmonology
• Pediatric Rheumatology
• Pediatric Sports Medicine
• Pediatric Transplant Hepatology
• Sleep Medicine

Why Choose

Physicians who decide to work with children usually make this decision either before or at the beginning of medical school. Most find there is an appeal working with individuals who are at the beginning stages of growth and development, whereas other patient populations are already at maturity.

Typical Schedule

You will spend a majority of your time in an office setting and do a lot of preventive care. This means providing immunizations and check-ups for healthy babies and children. If your practice has adolescents you will find you will need to spend time counseling your patients.

Practice hours may extend into the evenings and weekends to be more accommodating to patients. On-call is considered to be busy because you will constantly be fielding calls from parents who are worried about their children.

If You're Interested

You must be comfortable around children and realize that parent's are as much your patients as the children when it comes to explaining and ensuring compliance. Since your patients are children your diagnostic skills must be superb because it will be very difficult to get an accurate patient history or find out what exactly is bothering your patient.

When choosing pediatrics you will have a lot of practice options ranging from hospital based to private office or from public health to school health.

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