Lee Shapley: “With a debt load that size, a family practice doctor would probably take home less money than a registered nurse. Until the reimbursement system is fixed and the debt load addressed there will be shortage in primary care. The numbers don’t lie.”
Related posts:
- The death of primary care: The numbers tell it all
- Medical students avoiding primary care, is it more than money?
- Primary care doctors struggle to survive, even in Beverly Hills
- Treating the numbers
- Medical students want to become primary care doctors, until reality hits
- Recruiting nurses in a shortage, and lavishing gifts on applicants
- My take: Primary care, treating lawyers, bitter at doctors
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I’m not sure the title quote does the Medinnovationblog post justice. “The numbers” implies a reliance on actual data rather than an anecdote.
The fact is I think there are FAR better predictors of specialty selection than future income or debt load. See here or do a Pubmed search to start sifting through some of the other causes of allopathic students’ abandonment of primary care.
I’ll throw my own anecdote out there, merely to highlight some of the other reasons students might not be interested in primary care. I’m personally really put off by how primary care physicians are so negative. The entire ’specialty’ seems grumpy. Maybe understandably, but on blogs and on my family medicine rotation there was never a good thing said about the state of primary care. And there are good and important things about primary care which need to be highlighted for students but primary care physicians appear, in my experience alone, to lost sight of them amongst all the talk of waning reimbursement and faltering status amongst peers. Not that there isn’t a problem but I’m not sure I want such…pessimistic…physicians as future colleagues. I know that stereotypes primary care physicians but you can only make decisions based on what you see and you have to admit, that at least online, the focus on the positive is essentially absent.
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