One remedy for the looming shortage of physicians in the United States is expanding the caregiver workforce to include nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs). These health professionals come from fairly disparate backgrounds, yet over the years, increasing numbers of them have practiced side by side with physicians in primary care and specialty settings… Read More »
If you have ever been in a hospital, you are probably familiar with what seems like a continuously revolving door of staff members providing care. With nurses making up the largest occupation in healthcare and the largest segment of hospital staff, continuity of nursing care for hospitalized patients is an important factor in the delivery of quality healthcare.… Read More »
Private practitioners are busy people between caring for their patients, recording and documenting data, going to meetings, keeping up with new treatment modalities, and running a practice group. They follow a tight schedule, have multiple sources of pressure, and suffer from burnout. Stress occurs when a person is drained of energy, but can recover. In the case of… Read More »
The lack of primary care infrastructure in the U.S. has been blamed for our extremely high health expenditures, as we spend about 2.5 times what other comparable countries spend (OECD Health at a Glance) without better health outcomes. Increasing our primary care workforce is an important part of controlling health care costs while also providing… Read More »
Provider burnout and turnover [PDF] is a major challenge for many community health centers. One factor contributing to this problem is workplace climate, or what the experience of working at the health center is like. As anyone in primary care will tell you, at times it can be overwhelming. Thus it was with great interest that… Read More »
Delivering the Olga M. Jonasson Lecture at the 101st Annual Clinical Congress of the American College of Surgeons in Chicago, IL in October 2015, Dr. Julie Ann Freischlag noted how difficult it is for women to break down barriers in many fields, especially in academic medicine. But Dr. Freischlag is no ordinary woman. Throughout her career, she… Read More »
According to the 2013 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, hospital inpatient expenses account for a large portion (nearly 30%) of total health care expenses and health care spending is highly concentrated among a relatively small proportion of individuals. The top 1% of spenders accounted for 21.5% of total expenditures while the lower 50% accounted for just… Read More »
In 1999, the Institute of Medicine released a report called To Err is Human. This report estimated that 44,000 to 98,000 hospitalized patients die each year as a result of preventable medical errors. But how do medical errors affect healthcare workers? A recent article by Van Gerven and colleagues, published ahead of print in Medical Care, addresses that… Read More »