According to a new survey report released by The Physicians Foundation, 80% of physicians across all specialties report being at full capacity or overextended, and 78% reported sometimes, often, or always experiencing feelings of burnout.
Leslie Flores
Sixty-two percent of U.S. doctors are pessimistic about the future of medicine, and 49% wouldn’t recommend medicine as a career to their children. This paints a pretty grim picture of medical practice in the United States in 2018.
The survey is conducted every other year by The Physicians Foundation with the assistance of Merritt Hawkins, and I wrote a blog post about the 2016 survey results, which showed alarming levels of disengagement and burnout. So, I thought it would be worthwhile looking over the 2018 report to see if anything has improved.
It appears that things haven’t changed much for doctors since 2016 regarding their attitudes toward their work. The biggest take-away from this year’s survey is that doctors overall are working fewer hours and seeing fewer patients but still struggling with morale and burnout. One important trend that was highlighted is the move toward employment by hospitals or integrated delivery systems; only 31% of physicians are independent practice owners or partners, vs. 49% in the first such survey conducted in 2012. Interestingly, employed doctors tend to work longer hours but see fewer patients compared with their practice-owner colleagues.
The 39-question survey is sent out via e-mail to more than 700,000 physicians (everyone the AMA or Merritt Hawkins has in their databases), and this year 8,774 physicians responded; the statistics geniuses at the University of Tennessee say the survey results have a margin of error of +/– 1.057%. Interestingly, that’s less than half of the 17,236 physicians who responded to the survey in 2016, and I wonder if the reduction in response rate itself indicates an increased level of disengagement among doctors.
Doctors expressed similar frustrations with specific aspects of their work this year, compared with 2016. The single biggest frustration cited by doctors was EHRs (39% this year vs. 27% in 2016), followed by regulatory/insurance requirements (down to 38% from 58% in 2016) and loss of clinical autonomy (37% vs. 32% in 2016). Survey respondents reported working an average of 51.4 hours per week, of which 11.4 hours (22%) are spent on nonclinical (paperwork) duties.
Read the full post at hospitalleader.org.
Also on The Hospital Leader
- I don’t want someone like you caring for me by Gopi Astik, MD
- CMS added care transition codes a few years back. How’s that goin’? by Brad Flansbaum, DO, MPH, MHM
- Sleepless in the hospital no more: Lessons learned during the SIESTA Study by Vineet Arora, MD, MAPP, MHM
- Are you committing malpractice by not treating opioid use disorder in the hospital? by Chris Moriates, MD
