Transfusion Medicine & Blood Banking — Specialty Profile

Exploratory, not prescriptive. This profile blends hard data (pay, match rates, burnout, demographics, each sourced and dated) with generalizations and synthesized opinion about culture and "who fits." It's here to help you get curious and go find out for yourself, not to tell you who to become. Numbers marked ⟳ verify change every year; check the linked source before you quote one. Last reviewed: 2026-08-04.

Also called: blood banking, BB/TM, transfusion medicine, apheresis medicine, and increasingly cellular therapy. A 1-year ACGME-accredited fellowship entered after a pathology residency, and for some candidates after another ABMS residency. Organ system: blood, considered as a therapy rather than as a diagnosis.

Subspecialty fellowship of Pathology.

The 30-second version

Transfusion medicine is the pathology subspecialty that has patients. Every other corner of the specialty produces a diagnosis and hands it to someone else; this one runs a therapy. A transfusion medicine physician directs the hospital blood bank, decides what to do when a patient's antibodies mean no compatible unit exists in the inventory, takes the call during a massive transfusion, performs therapeutic apheresis at the bedside for conditions like thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura, and increasingly runs the cellular therapy program that collects stem cells and supports CAR-T manufacturing. The intellectual core is immunohematology, which is the antigen-antibody problem of matching donor to recipient, and it becomes genuinely hard in the patients who need it most: the sickle cell patient alloimmunized by a lifetime of transfusion, the transplant candidate with antibodies against most of the population. The trade at the center of the field: an underpopulated, unglamorous, hospital-based specialty that has quietly become essential to cell and gene therapy, in a one-year fellowship almost nobody applies to.

Quick dashboard (details and sources below)
Training after med school 5 years (4 yr AP/CP pathology + 1 yr transfusion medicine fellowship)
Total from college start ~13 years (4 undergrad + 4 med school + 4 residency + 1 fellowship)
Training chain Med school (4) → Pathology (4) → 1 yr ACGME blood banking / transfusion medicine fellowship → ABPath certificate
Entry routes Pathology (primary). ABPath allows some subspecialties to be entered by diplomates of other ABMS member boards ⟳
Competitiveness Low, and unmeasured — pathology fellowships sit outside the NRMP match, so no fill rate is published for this one ⟳
Typical full-time pay No survey line. Parent pathology runs $394,000 (Medscape 2026) or $373,384 (Doximity 2025); this is a hospital-based, medical-director role ⟳
Pay vs. parent (general pathology) Around or somewhat below, with income driven by medical directorship rather than specimen volume ⟳
Lifestyle Hospital-based, daytime, weekday, with genuine call for massive transfusion and urgent apheresis ⟳
Burnout No subspecialty figure; parent pathology is 28.3% against a 41.9% all-physician average (AMA 2025), third-lowest of the rows it names ⟳
% women 50.0% of blood banking / transfusion medicine fellows (ACGME, AY2024-25); parent pathology 44% practicing, 54.7% of residents ⟳
DO / IMG accessibility Open for international graduates. Pathology 19.6% DO and 34.7% IMG; the fellowship's own 46 fellows are 4.3% DO and 37.0% IMG ⟳

What they actually do

Immunohematology is the intellectual core. Blood group antigens and the antibodies patients form against them are the field's fundamental problem, and it is harder than the ABO chart in a first-year textbook suggests. A chronically transfused patient forms antibodies to antigens they lack, and each one narrows the compatible donor pool. In the difficult cases the reference laboratory work becomes a genuine puzzle, and the answer determines whether a unit can be issued at all.

Blood bank medical direction is the administrative and clinical backbone: inventory management, transfusion policy, appropriateness review, adverse reaction investigation, and the patient blood management programs that have shifted practice toward transfusing less. That last point matters, since the field's own evidence base drove restrictive transfusion thresholds and reduced the volume of its own product.

Therapeutic apheresis is the procedural half, and it is a bedside service. Plasma exchange for thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura, myasthenic crisis, and Guillain-Barré syndrome; red cell exchange for sickle cell disease; leukocytapheresis for hyperleukocytosis; photopheresis for graft-versus-host disease. The physician assesses the patient, writes the prescription, manages the access and the complications, and follows the course.

Cellular therapy has become the growth area, and it is why this field matters more now than it did a decade ago. Hematopoietic progenitor cell collection, processing, and cryopreservation sit under transfusion medicine at most institutions, and the arrival of CAR-T and other engineered cell products has pulled the discipline into the center of cancer therapeutics. Apheresis collection is the first step of a CAR-T manufacturing chain, and somebody has to own it.

Representative work: antibody identification and complex compatibility testing · issuing blood in massive transfusion and trauma activation · transfusion reaction investigation · therapeutic plasma exchange, red cell exchange, and photopheresis · hematopoietic progenitor cell collection and processing · CAR-T and cellular therapy product handling · patient blood management and utilization review · donor center medical direction · perinatal immunohematology, including hemolytic disease of the fetus and newborn · HLA and histocompatibility laboratory oversight at some institutions.12

A day in the life: the blood bank, the phone, and the apheresis suite. Much of the day is consultation, since clinicians call about whether to transfuse, what to do about an incompatible crossmatch, or how to manage a reaction. Apheresis rounds are scheduled but the acute cases are not. Committee and administrative work is a real fraction of the job, because medical directorship is the role rather than an add-on to it. Cellular therapy programs add regulatory and accreditation work, which is substantial and unglamorous.

On call: genuine, and this distinguishes the field from the rest of pathology. Massive transfusion protocols activate at night. A new diagnosis of thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura needs plasma exchange urgently, not in the morning. The call is phone-heavy rather than in-house, but it is real.

The training path & time to completion

Medical school (4 yrs) → anatomic and clinical pathology residency (4 yrs) → 1-year ACGME-accredited blood banking and transfusion medicine fellowship → ABPath subspecialty certification.12

  • The fellowship is one year and ACGME-accredited, and blood banking/transfusion medicine is one of ABPath's eleven subspecialty certifications.2
  • ABPath's rule leaves a door open for non-pathologists. Its subspecialty certificates are available to candidates with ABPath primary certification "or for some subspecialties certified by another member board" of the ABMS.2 In practice, transfusion medicine fellowships do train physicians from internal medicine, pediatrics, hematology, and anesthesiology backgrounds, though the pathology route is the standard one. If you are coming from a non-pathology residency, verify eligibility directly with ABPath before committing. ⟳
  • Total from the start of college: about 13 years.

Where this fellowship sits in the reform. Pathology fellowship recruitment is being restructured, with hematopathology, molecular genetic pathology, forensic pathology, and bone and soft tissue pathology committing to a formal match for 2026–27 and other subspecialties invited to join the 2027 cycle.3 Transfusion medicine has not committed. Given that the field's problem is too few applicants rather than too many, a match is a less urgent fix here than in the oversubscribed subspecialties. ⟳

How competitive is it?

This is an easy fellowship to reach, and the honest way to say so is to name what is and is not measured. No fill rate is published for transfusion medicine at all. Pathology's fellowships sit outside the NRMP's Specialties Matching Service — the field has only just begun moving four of them into a match, and transfusion medicine is not among the four — so there is no national table with a row for it.3 What the evidence does consist of is programs that actively recruit, a documented shortage of blood bank and cellular therapy medical directors, and the absence of a match to ration the seats. A pathology resident who wants this training can generally get it. ⟳

The reasons are structural rather than a comment on the work:

  • The field is invisible to medical students. Almost nobody encounters a transfusion medicine physician during training, so the specialty never enters the choice set.
  • It competes against dermatopathology and hematopathology for the same residents, and those two have clearer pay and job-market stories.
  • The name works against it. "Blood banking" sounds administrative and describes a fraction of what the job is.

The consequence is a genuine workforce problem that works in a trainee's favor. Hospitals need blood bank medical directors, cellular therapy programs need physicians who understand apheresis and product handling, and there are not many people qualified to do it. That is an unusual position for a job candidate to be in.

Board: ABPath subspecialty certification in blood banking/transfusion medicine.2

Compensation — the robust version

No compensation survey isolates transfusion medicine, and it does not appear even in the aggregator compilations that cover the other pathology subspecialties.4 This section is therefore reasoning from structure rather than reporting a figure.

The parent anchor. General AP/CP pathology runs $394,000 (Medscape 2026, 2025 earnings) or $373,384 (Doximity 2025, 2024 earnings), the two surveys that publish the field. No percentile ladder exists for pathology from either of them — the 25th/median/75th figures that circulate come from self-report aggregators and are not carried here.5 ⟳

Why this field's economics differ from the rest of pathology. Pathology income mostly scales with specimen volume: a dermatopathologist or hematopathologist bills per case, and the high earners are in high-throughput settings. Transfusion medicine has very little of that. Its revenue model is medical directorship, meaning a contracted or salaried role directing a blood bank, an apheresis service, a donor center, or a cellular therapy program, plus professional fees for apheresis procedures and consultations. That produces a stable, hospital-based salary without the volume upside the other subspecialties have.

Two things push in the other direction, and they count. First, a single physician can hold multiple directorships, since a blood bank, an apheresis service, and a cellular therapy laboratory are separate roles that one person often covers, and each carries a stipend. Second, the cellular therapy boom has made this expertise genuinely scarce at exactly the moment hospitals are building CAR-T programs, which is the kind of supply-demand mismatch that moves salaries.

The honest summary. Expect something around or somewhat below the general pathology range, arriving as a hospital salary rather than as production income, with less upside and less downside than a volume-based practice. Scarcity is your leverage, and it is real.

Limited-data caveat: no MGMA, Doximity, or aggregator line for transfusion medicine was located. The parent figures are sourced; everything else here is structural reasoning about the revenue model, and should be treated as such. Benchmark against academic and hospital pathology salary scales, and ask specifically what directorship stipends are included. ⟳

Lifestyle

  • Hospital-based, daytime, weekday in its scheduled form, inheriting most of pathology's controllability.5
  • Real call, unlike the rest of pathology. Massive transfusion protocols and urgent plasma exchange arrive at night, and the transfusion medicine physician is who gets called. It is usually phone consultation rather than coming in, but it is a genuine obligation and it is the field's main lifestyle deduction.
  • Bedside procedural work in apheresis, which is a change of scene from a sign-out desk and one of the reasons people choose this field.
  • Substantial administrative and regulatory load. Committee work, accreditation, utilization review, and, in cellular therapy, FDA and FACT regulatory compliance. Some people find this satisfying institutional work and others find it a drain.
  • Geographic flexibility is good. Every hospital with a blood bank needs a medical director, and every hospital has a blood bank. The map is much wider than neuropathology or pediatric pathology.

Lifestyle rating: 4/5. Weekday and controllable with meaningful autonomy, deducted for genuine call and a heavy administrative component.

Wellbeing — the part to take seriously

No transfusion-medicine-specific wellbeing data exists. Inherit pathology at 28.3% burnout against a 41.9% all-physician average, third-lowest of the rows the AMA's 2025 Organizational Biopsy names.5 ⟳

The distinctive satisfaction is that you are treating rather than reporting. For a physician who liked pathology's intellectual content but missed patients, this is the corner of the specialty that gives both, and practitioners say so consistently. Performing a plasma exchange on a patient with thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura is one of the more dramatic interventions in medicine, and the response is often rapid and visible.

The distinctive frustration is being an interruption in other people's day. A large part of the job is telling clinicians that their transfusion request is not indicated, that the product they want is not available, or that the crossmatch is incompatible. Being the person who says no, repeatedly, to colleagues under pressure, is a specific professional posture, and it wears on some people.

The alloimmunized sickle cell patient deserves specific mention, because it is where the field's technical problem and a longstanding equity problem meet. Patients transfused chronically from a donor pool with a different antigen distribution form antibodies that make future compatibility progressively harder, and the response has involved building donor programs targeted at the communities most affected. It is one of the clearest examples in medicine of a technical problem that is also a structural one, and people in this field think about it a lot.

Career longevity is good. No physical demands, a durable expertise base, and institutional roles that tend to expand with seniority.

Who's in the field (demographics)

The fellowship publishes more about itself than most subspecialties do. ACGME counts its 46 active fellows by sex and by medical school type, and both counts are small enough that one person moves a percentage by two points. Pathology is inherited only where the fellowship has no figure.

  • Women: 50.0% of blood banking / transfusion medicine fellows in AY2024-25, almost exactly the 49.5% across all active residents and fellows. Parent pathology runs 44% women practicing (AAMC, 2022 data) and 54.7% of residents.5 ⟳
  • DO: parent pathology is among the most DO-accessible specialties at 19.6% of the entering class, and the fellowship does not look like the residency feeding it. ACGME counts 2 osteopathic graduates among the 46 fellows in AY2024-25, which is 4.3%, roughly a quarter of the parent share. How much weight that carries is limited: a single fellow moves it two points, and in a fellowship that struggles to fill, a low share is at least as likely to mean few osteopathic graduates apply as that anything is screening them out. What it does rule out is any claim that the second door is as open as the first.5 ⟳
  • IMG: the inheritance holds cleanly on this axis. Parent pathology runs 34.7% IMG, among the highest of any specialty, and ACGME counts 17 international graduates among the 46 fellows, 37.0%. Combined with a fellowship that struggles to fill, this is one of the most accessible routes an international graduate has to a hospital medical-director role in American medicine.5 ⟳
  • Underrepresented in medicine: no subspecialty figure. The patient population most affected by the field's hardest technical problem, chronically transfused sickle cell patients, is overwhelmingly Black, and donor recruitment in those communities is part of the clinical solution. ⟳

Culture, personality & the online stereotypes

Who gravitates here: pathology residents who missed patients, and people who like systems. The field rewards those who enjoy being the institutional expert, who are comfortable with regulatory detail, and who find the immunohematology puzzle genuinely interesting. It also attracts people drawn to cellular therapy, which is where the field's frontier is. As always, plenty of people in the field do not fit any single mold.

The stereotypes. Community perception rather than fact, each with a kernel and an unfair edge:

  • "Blood bank is where you go if you cannot read slides." The oldest and least fair one, reflecting the fact that this is a clinical pathology subspecialty in a specialty that prizes anatomic diagnosis. It ignores that immunohematology is technically demanding and that the job requires clinical judgment the sign-out desk does not.
  • "The department of no." Half true and half the point. Utilization review and appropriateness gatekeeping are real parts of the role, and they exist because unnecessary transfusion harms patients.
  • "Nobody chooses it, they end up in it." Uncomfortably close to accurate given fill rates, and changing as cellular therapy raises the field's profile.
  • "It is the most clinical pathology gets." Meant as a compliment inside the field, and true. Apheresis is bedside medicine with a prescription and a patient.

What people say online (synthesized and paraphrased, not quotes): across trainee and physician forums, transfusion medicine reads as an underrated field with an image problem. The recurring theme is that residents who rotate through it are frequently surprised, having expected an administrative role and found a clinical one. A second, consistently practical thread is the job market, with posters noting that blood bank directorships are widely available, that the fellowship fills poorly, and that a candidate has genuine leverage. A third and increasingly prominent thread is cellular therapy, discussed as the reason the field's stock is rising, since CAR-T programs need physicians who understand apheresis collection and product handling. A fourth is compensation, generally described as solid but flat, without the volume upside of dermatopathology or hematopathology. The tone is quietly enthusiastic and a little defensive.

Voices from the field. Paraphrased from published sources, with links to the originals:

  • ABPath lists blood banking/transfusion medicine among its eleven subspecialty certifications, available after one or two years of ACGME-accredited fellowship training to candidates with ABPath primary certification or, for some subspecialties, certification by another ABMS member board.2
  • Pathology fellowship recruitment is being reformed toward a unified match, with four subspecialties committed for 2026–27; transfusion medicine is not among them, and its problem is applicant scarcity rather than crowding.3

Why people choose it / why people leave

Why choose it: the only pathology subspecialty with its own patients and its own therapy · therapeutic apheresis, which is bedside procedural medicine with visible results · cellular therapy and CAR-T, which have made this expertise newly essential · a genuinely favorable job market, since every hospital needs a blood bank director · geographic flexibility · institutional leverage, since multiple directorships can be held by one physician · a one-year fellowship · immunohematology as a real intellectual puzzle.

Why leave or avoid it: genuine call, unlike the rest of pathology · a heavy administrative and regulatory load · pay without the volume upside other pathology subspecialties have · the professional posture of frequently saying no to colleagues · low prestige within pathology, fairly or not · a field most people never encounter, so you will explain what you do for a career.

Best fit if: you liked pathology but missed patients · you want to run something rather than report on it · you are interested in cellular therapy and where it is going · you are comfortable with regulatory and committee work · you want a strong job market and geographic choice.

Not for you if: you want to be free of call · administrative work would drain you · you want the highest pathology income, which is in volume-based practice · you would find being the utilization gatekeeper uncomfortable · you want a field with obvious external prestige.

The FLI angle — Transfusion medicine for first-gen, low-income & immigrant students

Where it fits FLI realities well:

  • This is one of the most accessible routes to a hospital leadership role in all of medicine. Pathology takes 19.6% DO and 34.7% IMG applicants, among the most open of any specialty, and this fellowship struggles to fill.5 A physician who wants a medical directorship, institutional standing, and a stable hospital salary can reach one here without a research arms race at either gate. One qualification, because the fellowship's own numbers do not say the same thing on both axes: international graduates are 37.0% of its 46 fellows, which matches the parent field, while osteopathic graduates are 4.3%, which does not. Nobody has published why.
  • PSLF fits well. The jobs are hospital-based, and hospitals are frequently nonprofit qualifying employers. Four residency years plus a fellowship year count toward the 120 payments.
  • The pay is stable and salaried, without production risk or a partnership buy-in, which matters if there is no family cushion behind you.
  • Geographic flexibility is real. Every hospital has a blood bank, so this is not a field that dictates which city you live in.
  • The cellular therapy wave gives you timing on your side. Expertise that is scarce while demand is growing is the best negotiating position a new attending can have.

Risks to name honestly:

  • Pathology pays below most of medicine, and this subspecialty sits around or below the pathology range with less upside than its siblings.5 It is a good, stable income and not a high one. If the goal is maximizing earnings, hematopathology or dermatopathology are the better answers within the same residency.
  • The prestige deficit is real and it may affect you. This is a low-visibility field within a low-visibility specialty, and for someone who has already had to prove themselves more than their peers, choosing a field others underrate is worth going into with eyes open. The counterargument is that institutional roles carry their own authority.
  • The call is real, which matters if you carry family responsibilities.
  • You will explain your job constantly, including to other physicians.

Bottom line for FLI: an open residency, an undersubscribed fellowship, a hospital directorship at the end, and a field whose importance is rising because of cell and gene therapy. For a student who wants a stable, salaried, PSLF-eligible career with institutional standing and real geographic freedom, this is one of the most attainable good outcomes in the Sky. What you give up is the income ceiling and the external prestige, and both are worth weighing honestly rather than dismissing.

Fun facts

  • It is the pathology subspecialty with patients. Therapeutic apheresis is a bedside procedure the physician prescribes, supervises, and follows.
  • The field's own evidence reduced demand for its product. Restrictive transfusion thresholds and patient blood management programs, largely driven by transfusion medicine research, mean hospitals transfuse considerably less than they used to.
  • CAR-T starts here. Apheresis collection is the first step in manufacturing an engineered cell product, which is why cellular therapy programs sit under transfusion medicine at most institutions.
  • Some patients have antibodies against almost everyone. Chronic transfusion can alloimmunize a person to the point that compatible units must be sourced from national rare donor registries.
  • Nobody publishes how full its fellowships are, because pathology's fellowships sit outside the national match. The absence of a match is itself the accessibility signal.
  • One physician, several directorships. Blood bank, apheresis service, donor center, and cellular therapy laboratory are separate medical-director roles that a single person frequently holds.

Sources

Footnotes

  1. Fellowship structure and clinical scope of blood banking and transfusion medicine — immunohematology and antibody identification, blood bank medical direction, massive transfusion, transfusion reaction investigation, therapeutic apheresis (plasma exchange, red cell exchange, photopheresis), hematopoietic progenitor cell collection and processing, cellular therapy product handling, patient blood management, donor center direction, and perinatal immunohematology. Composite of published US transfusion medicine fellowship curricula and the ACGME subspecialty description. (accessed 2026). ↩ ↩2

  2. Board structure and eligibility. American Board of Pathology — Subspecialty Certification: ABPath issues subspecialty certificates in blood banking/transfusion medicine, chemical pathology, clinical informatics, cytopathology, dermatopathology, forensic pathology, hematopathology, medical microbiology, molecular genetic pathology, neuropathology, and pediatric pathology; candidates with ABPath primary certification, "or for some subspecialties certified by another member board of the American Board of Medical Specialties," may qualify after one or two years of ACGME-accredited fellowship training. Subspecialty exams scheduled September 8–28, 2026. https://abpath.org/subspecialty-certification/ and https://abpath.org/requirements/ (accessed 2026). ⟳ ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  3. Fellowship match reform. College of American Pathologists — "CAP Supports Fellowship Match Effort, Reinforces Workforce Commitment": hematopathology, molecular genetic pathology, forensic pathology, and bone and soft tissue pathology committed to a match for the 2026–27 academic year, with other eligible subspecialties encouraged to join the 2027 cycle placing fellows for 2028–29. Transfusion medicine is not among the committed four. https://newsroom.cap.org/latest-news/cap-supports-fellowship-match-effort--reinforces-workforce-commitment/s/97304fd5-c16c-459d-a2ce-acb517b0bd06 Corrected 2026-08-17: the dashboard, the whole competitiveness section and a Fun facts bullet asserted that transfusion medicine is "one of the few fellowships in medicine where positions regularly go unfilled," none of them with a citation, and none of them could have one. Two things are wrong with it. Unfilled fellowship positions are common rather than rare: NRMP's own 2026 Specialties Matching Service report states that "of the 81 participating subspecialties, 26 filled 90 percent or more of the positions offered and 32 filled less than 75 percent, including 8 subspecialties that filled less than 50 percent of their positions" (https://www.nrmp.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/SMS_Results_and_Data_2026_Revised-20260522.pdf). And transfusion medicine appears in that report not at all, because its fellowships are outside the match, which is what this footnote is about. The underlying accessibility claim survives on the evidence that does exist: recruiting behavior, a documented director shortage, and no match to ration seats. The comparative superlative does not. ⟳ ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. The absence of a compensation line. Physicians Thrive's pathologist compensation analysis breaks out dermatopathology, hematopathology, cytopathology, neuropathology, pediatric pathology, and forensic pathology, and does not report a transfusion medicine figure. https://physiciansthrive.com/physician-compensation/pathology/how-much-does-a-pathologist-make/ ⟳ ↩

  5. Parent-field figures for pathology: $394,000 (Medscape Physician Compensation Report 2026, 2025 earnings) and $373,384 (Doximity 2025 Physician Compensation Report, 2024 earnings). Corrected 2026-08-13: this footnote previously gave ~$370k–$390k with a 25th/median/75th ladder at $320k/$390k/$450k and partners at $500k–$550k+; that ladder came from self-report aggregators and neither survey publishes percentiles for pathology. burnout 28.3%, third-lowest of the rows the AMA names; 44% women practicing with residents at 54.7%; 19.6% DO and 34.7% IMG of the entering class; daytime/weekday work with little traditional call. See the pathology profile on this site for the full version. Sources for the non-pay figures above. Women in practice, pathology 44%: AAMC, "Women are changing the face of medicine in America" (2022 data), https://www.aamc.org/news/women-are-changing-face-medicine-america . 38.7% is AAMC's figure for physicians of every specialty combined, and using it for pathology understates the field by five points (corrected 2026-08-17: this record said six; 44 − 38.7 = 5.3). Women in training, AP/CP residents 54.7% and blood banking / transfusion medicine fellows 50.0% in academic year 2024-25, against 49.5% across all active residents and fellows: ACGME, Data Resource Book, Academic Year 2024-2025, Table C.21, https://www.acgme.org/globalassets/pfassets/publicationsbooks/2024-2025_acgme_databook_document.pdf . Correction 2026-08-13: this page previously said no subspecialty figure existed and carried the parent field at ~38% practicing with residents "roughly half," in the Quick dashboard and in Who's in the field. A fellowship figure exists, and the practicing figure was the all-physician one. Match figures, NRMP, Results and Data: 2026 Main Residency Match, May 2026, Table 2, https://www.nrmp.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Main_Match_Results_and_Data-2026.pdf : of 636 pathology positions offered, 99.7% filled, with U.S. MD seniors taking 41.6%, DOs 19.6% and IMGs 34.7%, and those are the parent figures this page now uses. The fellowship's own medical-school mix is published too, and it is not the parent's. ACGME, Data Resource Book, Academic Year 2024-2025, Table C.15 (Number of Active Residents by Specialty and Subspecialty and Medical School Type): blood banking / transfusion medicine, 46 fellows — 26 US LCME (56.5%), 17 international (37.0%), 2 osteopathic (4.3%), 1 Canadian (2.2%). Corrected 2026-08-17: this page said no published subspecialty-specific demographic data existed beyond the gender breakdown and then inherited pathology on both DO and IMG, while citing Table C.21 of this same book four tables later. C.15 has the row. The IMG inheritance survives it at 37.0% measured against ~36% inherited; the DO inheritance does not, at 4.3% measured against a residency running 19.6%, and the sentence "an undersubscribed fellowship adds no filter" was the one it contradicted. That sentence is gone, the FLI section's "open at both stages" is qualified, and the parent pair has moved to the 2026 figures this footnote already carried. The n is 46 and two of them are osteopathic graduates, so one fellow moves the share two points; the honest reading is that the number is thin rather than that a filter is documented. Burnout: AMA Organizational Biopsy 2025 — nearly 19,000 physician responses across 106 health systems in 38 states — puts Pathology at 28.3% against a 41.9% all-physician average, third-lowest of the rows it names, https://www.ama-assn.org/practice-management/physician-health/these-9-physician-specialties-report-highest-burnout-rates. Corrected 2026-08-17: the dashboard and the wellbeing section now lead with the AMA row rather than Medscape's ~41%. AMA is the instrument this page prefers wherever it publishes a row, because it is free, primary and current, and pathology is one of the roughly fifteen the Organizational Biopsy breaks out. The two baselines are seven points apart and never share a sentence. The Medscape reading, no longer the page's anchor: Physician Burnout & Depression Report 2024 (n=9,226, fielded July–October 2023), paywalled, relayed through Healthgrades Pro (https://resources.healthgrades.com/pro/the-most-and-least-burned-out-physicians-by-specialty), which puts pathology at 41% against an all-physician average of 49%. Corrected 2026-08-17: Advisory Board (https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2024/01/31/physician-burnout) was named here as a second relay carrying the row. It prints six specialties and the 49% baseline, and pathology is not among them. ⟳ ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8

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