With the advent of hospitalists, patients have to interact with more doctors than ever.
This means physicians may be unfamiliar with their patients. Too often however, doctors look past this fact and rush the initial visit, especially in the hospital.
Moreso, hospitalist programs are often staffed by newly graduated medical residents, who may not appreciate this nuance. Academic internist Robert Centor calls this a disadvantage, and that “while residency prepares them with the scientific knowledge they need to deliver competent patient care, it too often neglects patient-interaction skills.”
He further notes that the patient-doctor relationship in the hospital setting “can quickly become intense and require much skill.” It’s what separates good from great hospital physicians.
topics: hospitalist, doctor-patient
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{ 2 comments }
As a family practitioner who does not support hospitalists, this comes as no surprise. Why should they interact more than they need to with patients? Their bread and butter is not to develop a bond, but admit them, treat them and discharge them. They are to keep the beds filled, but keep patients moving at the same time. After all, it is a business model, and if bonding with patients suffers, who are we to complain?
Plus, claims to the contrary aside, hospitalists in my area are ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE at coomunicating with pcps. (Clarification: I admit to one local hospital, but occasionally a patient winds up at another, under the care of hospitalists; I usually do not know about it until they are in my office for follow up after discharge.)
A family practitioner
If you don’t support hospitalists, then you need to go admit all of your patients. Hospitalists are here to support PCPs and allow you to stay in your office. We have a mix at my hospital but I am finding that more and more of the community PCPs are NOT getting admitting priveleges. I am supposed to mostly admit for a well-defined group of PCPs, but we have this increasing number of “unassigned” – actually 85% of my service today was “unassigned”. And they all had PCPs, just none of them had admitting priveleges. It would also help if the community PCPs subscribed to the same EMR as the hospital. How do you expect a hospitalist to take good care of the patient when you don’t have access to any of their records. Plus FPs can’t do ICU level care so if you want someone to do it at 3 am, you can have your hospitalist who is already there of you can call in the already exhausted intensivist to treat your patient for sepsis. Your call…
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