Primary Care Physician Shortage Analysis

This paper will discuss the American healthcare system issue of primary care physician shortage, the challenges that they face leading to this shortage, the implications on the whole system, and possible solutions. There is a huge shortage of primary care physicians in this country. Even as more and more medical schools in this country open and start accepting students, primary care has fallen out of the spotlight of US medical graduates, with only one in five graduates by 2017 expecting to go on to practice primary care (Shipman & Sinsky, 2013). Primary care physicians are the foundation/base of any healthcare system. Without can abundant supply of these physicians, no system can operate efficiently. Bodenheimer and Pham (2010) say “…primary …show more content…
PCPs experience a high level of burnout, relatively early in their careers, due to policies and regulations that force these physicians to undertake far more clerical work than their peers in specialties (Shipman & Sinsky, 2013). Due to regulations (for “legal purposes”), primary care physicians are the ones that need to respond to clinical-related emails, chart and input data into the Electronic Health Records system (nurses do this in hospitals, for the most part), and even communicate with staff from health insurance companies for clarification on issues of coverage, among other things (Shipman & Sinsky, 2013). This takes away from the actual “seeing” of patients…which negates the whole reason for going through medical school and choosing this career path. This “clerical” work load and the income gap have led to a decline in aspiring PCPs and those already in the field to choose to leave (Shipman & Sinsky, …show more content…
Many of these solutions involve taking the workload of “clerical” tasks that do not require a physician’s skills and expertise (“legal” policies say that they do), and add it to the workload of other (non-clinical) staff members in office, seeing as these are wasteful to a physician’s time (Shipman & Sinsky, 2013). Doing “clerical/desk” is a waste of a physician’s time, as their skills are beyond this and could be put to better use. Another solution offered by Bodenheimer and Pham (2010) is to prolong (extend) the interval between follow up appointments. If one is to assume that every PCP in this country would follow this idea, then it would each physician to see more (distinct) patients, which could aid in the shortage problem (i.e. see more patients). “The delegation of tasks to nonprofessional team members and the use of phone and e-mail visits can also increase capacity (Bodenheimer & Pham,