Profiling
I just love when the ivory tower folks pontificate on how to get more medical students interested in primary care. The article in the American Medical News is a prime example. They even quote, of course, the Harvard people even though they STILL don’t have a family medicine department!
There are no immediate plans to develop a family medicine department at Harvard, but center officials are eager to expand student exposure to family medicine, he said. “Ideally, we would like to see a family medicine residency program at one or more of our large academic medical centers that attracts the best and brightest to train and lead a transformation of health care based on a strong system of team-based primary care practices,” Dr. Phillips said.
Are you kidding me? What year is it? Oh yeah, it is almost 2013 and Harvard still has no plans? Then why even quote these idiots?
While I appreciate the gist and thought behind this article, the authors don’t seem to get it. While schools might get some medical students interested, keeping their interest piqued will not be easy as family doctors in the field HATE how the system is destroying them.
SERMO poll showed 46% of MDs would not recommend medicine for their children.
I think it was the late 70’s before they had a Gynecology department that was free-standing. Your time could come!
Pri-care docs practiced for years in this field because of the work satisfaction i.e. “fun” it brought to them, making up for lesser pay. The pay never improved relative to the enormous regulatory/administrative burdens and unreasonable patient expectations that mushroomed.
What the Ivory Tower doesn’t, and will never get, is that relative to the hassle factor, this job is not fun any longer. I don’t regard it as a privilege, or exciting, or any of the other rah-rah blather pedaled by the sacred institutions. If they truly understood what Pri-Care really meant – among other things, the chance to be bossed around daily by hospitals, insurance companies, administrative nurses preparing for a JCAHO assault, government drones – then what sort of person would say “yeah, that’s for me!” ?
The big question, and the only chance we have left, is whether doing Direct Primary Care (cash only membership) can bring the fun back. I bet it can.
I no longer recommend this field to students. NP’s will take over since we are being made to be unit clerks to enter in hospital orders.
No more time to do hospital and office practice. Take away the hospital, leave the office and one is doing something the payers feel
(wrongfully so) NP’s can do just fine.
Until patient accountability is enacted stay away from family practice. The Ivory Tower Bastards expect us to be molly-coddling
nursemaids.
You have nailed it totally: I have come to the point that I encourage young people interested in medicine to “run, not walk, from primary care”. What a pitiful state we are in.