Butler health system primary care9/17/2023 ![]() ![]() The hospital wouldn't conduct the scan without insurance approval. Once, Antonucci said, she had to call an insurance company - by landline and cellphone simultaneously, with one phone on each ear - to get prior authorization to conduct a CT scan, while her patient in need of an appendectomy waited in pain. Jean Antonucci, a primary care doctor in rural Maine who retired from full-time work at 66, said she, too, would have kept working if not for the hassle of dealing with hospital administrators and insurance companies. "The administration was certainly a major factor in burnout." I really enjoyed my co-workers," he said. "We go into medicine to help people, to take care of people, to do good in the world," said Crummett, who retired from the Duke University hospital system in 2020 when he turned 65.Ĭrummett said he would have enjoyed working until he was 70, if not for the bureaucratic burdens of practicing medicine, including needing to get prior authorization from insurance companies before providing care, navigating cumbersome electronic health record platforms, and logging hours of administrative work outside the exam room. That's why, instead of leaving the profession in their 30s or 40s, doctors often stay in their jobs but retire early. Even primary care doctors, whose salaries are among the lowest of all medical specialties, are paid significantly more than the average American worker. The high level of student debt most medical school graduates carry, combined with salaries more than four times as high as the average, deter many physicians from quitting medicine midcareer. "I'm not saying there aren't issues for other specialists, too, but in primary care, it's the worst problem," he said. "Everyone in health care feels overworked," said Gregg Coodley, a primary care physician in Portland, Oregon, and author of the 2022 book "Patients in Peril: The Demise of Primary Care in America." Even before the pandemic, 70% of primary care providers and 89% of primary care residents reported feelings of burnout. Those numbers appear to be even higher in primary care. Similarly, in a 2022 AMA survey of 11,000 doctors and other medical professionals, more than half reported feeling burned out and indicated they were experiencing a great deal of stress. More than 20% said they wanted to retire within a year. will be short as many as 48,000 primary care physicians by 2034, a higher number than any other single medical specialty.Ī survey published last year by The Physicians Foundation, a nonprofit focused on improving health care, found more than half of the 1,501 responding doctors didn't have positive feelings about the current or future state of the medical profession. A 2021 report published by the Association of American Medical Colleges projects the U.S. That's why burnout exacerbates workforce shortages and, if it continues, may limit the ability of some patients to access even basic care. aren't growing fast enough to meet future demand, according to the American Medical Association. ![]() I don't love that culture."Īnd though the pipeline of physicians entering the profession is strong, the ranks of doctors in the U.S. "In medicine, we're just expected to be resilient 24/7. "Resiliency is a cringe word for me," Miller said. The culture of medicine encourages them to simply bear it. A long-standing stigma keeps physicians from prioritizing their own mental health, while their jobs require them to routinely grapple with death, grief and trauma. "I don't know why anyone would go into primary care."ĭoctors say they are fed up with demands imposed by hospital administrators and health insurance companies, and they're concerned about the notoriously grueling shifts assigned to medical residents during the early years of their careers. "Why go into primary care when you can make twice the money doing something with half the stress?" said Daniel Crummett, a retired primary care doctor who lives in North Carolina. And while burnout occurs across medical specialties, some studies have shown that primary care doctors, such as pediatricians and family physicians, may run a higher risk. Rates of physician suicide, partly fueled by burnout, have been a concern for decades. Health systems across the country are trying to boost morale and keep clinicians from quitting or retiring early, but the stakes are higher than workforce shortages. Burnout in the health care industry is a widespread problem that long predates the COVID-19 pandemic, though the chaos introduced by the coronavirus's spread made things worse, physicians and psychologists said. ![]()
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