President’s Letter from Bill Steinbach

When I assumed leadership of our great Society in 2023, I pinpointed two intertwined areas that I hoped to truly impact for the betterment of PIDS and our specialty: workforce expansion and appropriate compensation. There are lots of fantastic initiatives underway to propel numerous aspects of our field, and our committee realignment has catapulted these forward with renewed efficiency, but these two areas are domains where collectively we could be transformative.

PIDS has tremendous committees, the Workforce Development Committee and the Membership Engagement Committee, that are now driving our efforts in workforce expansion. Meanwhile, the Compensation Committee has been laser-focused on compensation for our field. If you attended our State of the Society/Annual Membership Meeting at IDWeek you heard about the launch of an intended white paper to plant our first definitive flag on appropriate compensation for our subspecialty. 

PIDS endeavored to gauge compensation and make recommendations in 2019. We had completed two surveys of Division Chiefs with moderate responses yet heterogenous data and were developing actionable next steps in 2020 when the world collapsed. As we strove to take care of kids during the pandemic, much of this work fell by the wayside. In 2023, we revitalized that effort to once again get an accurate measurement of all we do and how we are recognized at our respective institutions through a new survey.

That work was performed by the now Compensation (née Division Chiefs) Committee and led by David Hunstad, Paul Spearman and several others who worked hard on that new survey. It revealed a growing number of Divisions that are “raising the bar” on salaries, utilizing the AMSPDC (national group of Pediatric Chairs) approach. 

Now for the next step. Members of the Compensation Committee will be joined by ten other Chairs and Chiefs in our Society with specialized expertise as part of a special task force dedicated to the development of a white paper. It will be a scientific, data-driven product with clear commentary and actionable recommendations for our entire field. This white paper will be something we can be proud to claim as PIDS and use in discussions of pediatric infectious diseases’ actual, accurate value and practitioners’ worth to an institution.

Earlier I mentioned that workforce expansion and appropriate compensation were intertwined. We already know we have the best job in the world. However, some students and residents who experience the joys of pediatric ID – whether through a rotation or a program such as meetID – may be dissuaded to joining our ranks due to our position on the compensation scale. This is particularly true of those who may be from groups underrepresented in medicine or disadvantaged backgrounds.

The Board of Directors and I envision this white paper will help start addressing these very important areas. It will focus not only on where we are, but where we should be in compensation and how we can raise that level to better compensate current pediatric ID practitioners and attract future ones.

I will remind everyone again that this is hard, which is why it has never been done before, and its importance is specifically why we are tackling it now. Our plan is to provide membership with preliminary findings by IDWeek 2025.