University of Chicago : Primary care doctors would need more than 24 hours in a day to provide recommended care; UChicago Medicine study: Most physicians don't have enough time to fulfill all patient care needs.
ENPNewswire-August 12, 2022--University of Chicago : Primary care doctors would need more than 24 hours in a day to provide recommended care; UChicago Medicine study: Most physicians don't have enough time to fulfill all patient care needs
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Release date- 11082022 - If they followed national recommendation guidelines for preventive care, chronic disease care and acute care, it would take a primary care physician 26.7 hours per day to see an average number of patients, a new study finds.
'There is this sort of disconnect between the care we've been trained to give and the constraints of a clinic workday,' said Justin Porter, lead author of the paper and an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Chicago. 'We have an ever-increasing set of guidelines, but clinic slots have not increased proportionately.'
This study builds on others that have found a discrepancy between guidelines and a physician's time. And it has real consequences for the delivery of health care; the researchers said that time pressure helps explain why improvements in outcomes have not kept pace with advances made in the field.
Time pressure plays a role in inequities in health care, with vulnerable populations typically receiving care at overburdened clinics. It also has an impact on patient satisfaction.
'If you do surveys with patients about what frustrates them about their medical care, you'll frequently hear, 'My doctor doesn't spend time with me' or 'My doctor doesn't follow up,'' said Porter. 'I think a lot of times this is interpreted as a lack of empathy, or a lack of willingness to care for a patient. But the reality-for the majority of doctors-is simply a lack of time.'
According to the researchers, time constraints are also a key factor in physician burnout, one of the drivers pushing medical students from the field.
The new research-conducted by the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins University and Imperial College London-used a simulation study to compute time per patient based on data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.
It built on previous studies by including all types of care a primary care physician provides-preventive, acute, and chronic-as well as administrative tasks, and accounted for changes to the guidelines that have occurred since earlier studies were published. It also used a different methodology, employing real patient data from an annual national survey to...
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