Wanted: Physicians Who Will Submit

This is what it has come to.  Here is the article entitled Hospitals seeking to hire doctors who “play well with others”.   The subtitle goes on:

As more health systems form accountable care organizations, they are putting a premium on the ability to work alongside physician assistants and nurse practitioners.

So what are they saying?   There is no more chain of command.   Doctors, with all their education and experience, are not to be in charge.  Hospital administrators, who somehow think they run the healthcare system, want only sheep to work in their building.  It makes their lives so much easier when docile doctors do what they say and have no opinions.   They call it being “team oriented” which is a smoke screen.   Speak up and you’re labeled a “disruptive physician”.   Here are some more quotes from the linked article:

  • “There are certain personality attributes and characteristics that, unless it was for a physician leadership position, I don’t think most places have really asked for before.”
  • The health systems in the survey expressed optimism about finding doctors who are flexible in who they work with and when they work.
  • We’ve been looking for quite a while for physicians who would at least play well with others.

So what is going on here?  The is about breaking the will of doctors.  This is about setting us up for NPs to be in charge of the ACOs and forcing hired physicians to comply.  This is about control and power.  Hospital administrators want it and need to covertly change the landscape of the healthcare system in order to get it.  This is what they meet about all day while we are working.   Physicians are too busy seeing patients to see what is going on and even when they do they just roll over.   It is called learned helplessness.    What the world forgets, however, is that if an administrator goes missing for a month, no one notices.  If a doctor goes missing for a day, there is utter chaos.  So who is more important?