Reply to S/o What the f do you all want from doctors?

Forum Index » Health and Medicine

Reply to "S/o What the f do you all want from doctors?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]To be honest, I don't understand why the healthcare system cannot be reformed such that primary care doctors can spend AT LEAST ONE HOUR with a patient per year.

Lawyers make lots of money and manage to spend an hour here and there with a client, c'mon.

Of course our system is broken and our population is chronically ill and too many dying unnecessarily has something to do with the standard of care being 20 minutes/year with one's primary care physician.

Any idiot can see that there is a strong relationship between those things.[/quote]

The average primary care doctor has about 2500-3000 patients on their roster, and that's only possible if they are turning people away. People get angry when you decline to take on new patients, because "what am I supposed to do? I need a doctor!" But so do thousands of other people.

Let's say 2500 patients. One hour a year each is a total of 150,000 minutes a year. 2885 minutes a week, which is 577 minutes a workday (with 5 workdays a week). So if your doctor has a smaller than normal number of patients and spends no vacation ever, and takes no lunch break, he or she can open clinic at 8am and will close after working straight through at 6pm every day -- and there's 23 minutes available left over for using the bathroom and drinking water.

None of that includes phone calls, portal messages, or emails. And given that the average percentage of time spent on paperwork for a US physician is at least 40%, that doc will then work from 6pm until midnight on the paperwork, unless they were doing it at the computer while you were talking.

And none of that includes sick visits, or helping the family who was adamant that they are all healthy and won't take up much time because they are never sick -- until they are, and the 39 year old father has brain cancer, and the children are in trauma from it, and the 38 year old mother has clinical depression, and and and. Because those things don't happen often to one family, but spread out over 2500-3000 people, it's common enough.

What you want isn't possible under the current system, PP. It's just math. Can we design another system? Sure. That would be a great discussion. But being mad at the people trying to hold things together right now, just because they cannot make the impossible happen, is what is breaking them. They are leaving. The numbers just get harder, or you just turn more people away. [/quote]

This. End thread. [/quote]

No, it’s not end thread.

Obviously it’s time to build more medical schools or create more slots for medical students and to thereby expand the pool of physicians substantially.

But the AMA and many practicing physicians don’t want to see the practice of medicine expanded that way because it would ultimately meaner lower salaries. We could invest heavily in subsidized medical education to compensate in part, but there would still be reduced potential for the type of salaries that put luxury vehicles in the driveway and leisure craft in a slip at the local marina etc.  [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics