Recently, 227 HCPs across 24 specialties and 41 states took part in a survey that asked two main questions:
1. How satisfied are you with your current position?
2. What are the main stress factors in your job?
There were many comments on this survey, but here are a few selected responses from your fellow colleagues:
– We are becoming more about the money and less about quality care and meeting the needs of the patient.
– Electronic records make my work less satisfying and more time-consuming. I still feel expected to see the same number of patients, even though it takes longer, which means always being behind and/or taking work home.
– It’s getting tougher to maintain a solo practice in this era of more and more intrusive managed care, particularly med PAs clearly designed to harass rather than justify unusual Rx.
– I am happy in my role as a physician but am facing increasing difficulty to meet the various additional non-medical issues, such as EHR, meeting MOC requirements, Prior authorization for procedures and medications, faxing prescriptions and medical data, increasing patients’ deductible amounts and therapeutic noncompliance due to financial burden.
– Administrative burden is increasingly time consuming to the point of requiring extenend hours of work outside of EVERY workday.
– Work at walk-in Urgent Care clinic open 8-8 and takes all comers. See 40-50 patients a day and never a chance for a break or a shift that is less than 13hrs. Salary is low, no productivity bonus, poorly staffed. It’s an absolute pummeling.
– Being expected to provide adequate patient care in my aging population of patients in 15 minute time slots.
– As long as we can focus on the reason we became doctors – caring for people, we can enjoy our calling. It’s the loss of autonomy and the continuous regulations by other entities that wear on us.
– I spend a huge amount of time doing data entry in the computer. I use Epic and it is very poor interface. I spend more time with data than with my patients. I have tried to get help for burn out, but in reality there is no help. Our leadership recommends more exercise, yoga, etc, but the main problem is lack of time to do any of these recommendations and they do no customize our EHR. I have started to decrease the amount of time I see patients as most of my friends have done.
– Mandatory reporting requirements to stakeholders such as insurance companies do not improve healthcare for patients. They only give the payers larger amounts of data that they can use to reduce future payments to providers. Moreover it is a significant waste of practice’s time to capture and share this data. Practicing tai chi has dramatically improved my personal spiritual and mental well-being.
– Love my job have been doing it for 21 years.
