Have you recently asked for an appointment with your primary care physician (PCP) but instead end up .png?width=125&name=Female_Doctor_(2).png)
meeting with a Nurse Practitioner (NP) or Physician Assistant (PA)? If you’ve found it increasingly difficult to see your PCP, you’re not alone.
In the United States we are facing a deficit of PCPs. We are now short approximately 9,000 primary care doctors. Generally, primary care doctors and physicians include family doctors, geriatricians, general practitioners and internists. These doctors don’t focus on a particular specialty, but instead care for your overall health and well being.
While the Congressional Budget Office is predicting the Affordable Care Act will bring in 30 million health care consumers in the next 10 years, the Association of American Medical Colleges states the physician deficit will increase to 100,000 in the next six years. More patients and fewer PCPs means you will likely be seeing more of your NP or PA in the future.
Though there are a number of reasons for this pending shortage, what’s clear is that it may not get better anytime soon. A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that out of 50,000 doctors training in internal medicine, the majority planned to focus on subspecialists. Perhaps more telling is that of the students who planned on becoming PCPs, only one in five stayed on the PCP track at the end of their three-year residency. It seems that throughout the course of their education, students discover what the Archives of Internal Medicine found in their survey of physicians: 45.8 percent feel burned out. Of that 45.8 percent, PCPs rate themselves among the most burned out of all physicians.
These numbers have started to directly affect patients. The reality is your PCP can’t see you on short notice because they are likely working harder than ever before. In the Washington Monthly, Candice Chen, MD, chronicles her average day that includes seeing patients every fifteen minutes, running in the hallway to her next appointment, getting home late and staying up to complete all the paperwork that needs to be done for insurance purposes. With the physician shortage, doctors are doing more work and seeing more patients in shorter periods of time.
The obvious question most people ask is, “Why don’t physicians take on fewer patients?” The answer takes a deep dive into not only the physician shortage, but other complex issues in the U.S. healthcare system. We’ll address these issues, the solutions that are currently in the works, and why seeing your nurse practiotioner is not such a bad thing in our next post.