Primary care doctors handle 2,300 patients on average, far too many for them to be able to realistically follow guidelines for managing their patients' chronic illnesses, let alone their acute care needs, said Dr. Thomas Bodenheimer of University of California, San Francisco.
Thank you Dr. Bodenheimer!
I see doctors make the very difficult choice to right-size their practices, making it so that can give their patients the time and care they need. Then I see colleagues beat them up for cutting back.
Folks - if this keeps a doc in the work force a bit longer rather than retiring it is a good thing. Running good PCPs into the ground with impossible work loads and drowning them in an ocean of administrative trivia is the real problem.
Given the choice of trying to care for too many and continuing to do it badly or taking care of fewer but doing it well, I choose the latter.
Our society has to make primary care an attractive career choice if we're going to combat the PCP shortage.
yay Bodenheimer! I wonder who he said this to and if anyone heard?
Posted by: Jean Antonucci | February 28, 2010 at 09:03 AM