Are Doctors Endangered?
ningcontentThere are certain jobs that Americans simply won’t do. For example, Americans generally are not inclined to pick fruit for the wages that farmers are willing or able to pay. Busing tables, packing meat, and cleaning dishes also are low on the list of jobs that Americans are eager to take.
Unlikely as it may seem, there is another job that may have to be added to this list: family physician. Fewer and fewer American medical students today are choosing to be family doctors. In 2007, less than half of physicians choosing to specialize in family medicine were graduates of U.S. medical schools. The majority were graduates of foreign medical schools. Even with this influx of foreign medical students, an alarming number of family practice training positions (16 percent) went unfilled last year.
Why don’t American medical students want to be family doctors? The unfortunate answer is that family medicine – and medicine in general – has slowly but surely been devalued as a profession. Being a doctor is no longer what it once was. For many physicians, the stress and the hassle of being a doctor today outweigh the joy and satisfaction they get from treating patients.
Merritt, Hawkins & Associates’ 2007 survey of physicians age 50 to 65 years old found that almost half of older doctors plan to make a career change in the next one to three years by retiring, seeing fewer patients, working part-time, finding jobs outside of medicine, or working as temps. Many other physicians are giving up on private practice and are becoming hospital employees. Some no longer accept insurance payments and contract directly with patients in what are known as “boutique” or “concierge” practices. For many doctors, traditional medical practice has become a trap from which they are looking to escape. In the survey referenced above, 57 percent of doctors say they would not recommend medicine as a career to young people today. Forty-four percent say they would not choose medicine if they had their careers to do over.
It can be difficult for non-physicians to understand why many doctors are dissatisfied with medicine. It is true that most physicians earn good incomes. However, doctors start their careers relatively late in life, since it takes at least eleven years of collegiate and post-collegiate training to become a physician. In addition, medical school is expensive. On average, medical students are $120,000 in debt by the time they graduate. Over the course of their careers, most physicians will never see the incomes enjoyed by successful business executives, bankers, lawyers, stock brokers, and other professionals.
But money is not the key issue; empowerment is. Physicians spend years achieving medical skills that allow them to save lives, enhance lives, and bring life into the world. Despite their skills and training, however, physicians are increasingly marginalized by today’s medical system.
It is common today for physicians to be told by insurance companies and federal agencies how to practice medicine – which tests they can and can’t order, what type of drugs they can and can’t prescribe. Physicians also are routinely told by insurance companies and the federal government that they will not be paid for the services they provide, or that they will be paid at a rate less than their costs. They also must spend countless hours completing paperwork to justify why they should be paid — time they could be spending with patients. This peculiar system does not apply in any other line of work. Imagine a plumber, for example, who repairs a customer’s leaking faucet. The plumber then submits his bill not to the customer, but to a government agency, which pays him less than the cost of his tools. Add to this the constant threat of malpractice lawsuits – the great majority of them baseless – and you have some sense of why doctors feel frustrated and powerless.
It may be easy to dismiss the concerns of physicians when you are feeling healthy and fit. However, when you are being wheeled into the operating room, or when the health of a loved one is in jeopardy, the quality, training, commitment and availability of physicians suddenly becomes more meaningful. It is in everyone’s interest that medicine remains the type of profession that attracts the best and brightest people that America has to offer. By devaluing medicine as a profession and by marginalizing doctors we are simply ensuring that, sooner or later, there will not be enough physicians to go around.
Article by, Kurt Mosley http://www.recruitingtrends.com/advisory_board/tony_lee.html and courtesy of Kenndy Information Recruiting Trends providing leading edge insights and strategies for the recruiting professional
