“I adore seeing patients, but what will drive me out of family practice eventually is the paperwork.”
Sound familiar? If you spend hours each day filling out paperwork for which there’s no billing code, and if you spend your evenings and weekends completing form after endless form, and it’s driving you up the wall — well, you’re not alone. Recently, a team of Saskatchewan researchers set out to measure just how bad the problem has become.
In a study published In March’s Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, psychiatrist David Keegan and researchers Rein Lepnurm and Wallace Lockhart measured what they called the “daily distress” of doctors. They asked physicians across the country about their professional and personal lives: anger at colleagues, frustration with demanding patients, ability to sleep soundly, whether work responsibilities interfered with home lives, etc.
The study’s results were, well, deeply distressing. According to their measures, slightly more than 50% of doctors experience very serious distress several times a month; another 37% are in distress at least once a week.
Only three medical specialties measured above average for distress and they all did so by a large margin: emergency physicians, surgeons and GPs. For MDs who work in those fields, this probably comes as no surprise. The new study, wrote the researchers, confirms what’s known about “the plight of GPs acting as gatekeepers to the scarce resources of the healthcare system.”
What’s more, the amount of distress for these three groups appears to be increasing. The key culprit here appears to be paperwork — either by hand or by computer — and other administrative chores. “Recent healthcare reforms have caused physicians to become more involved in administrative functions and to increase their commitments in teaching and research,” reported the study. Nowhere has this change been greater than in family practice.
KNOW YOUR LIMITS
Dr. Keegan et al hint at a solution. Their research “suggests that there is a limit to how many responsibilities can be carried out by a busy professional, beyond which satisfaction with performance and personal satisfaction begins to suffer.”
That may seem obvious — you can’t do everything — but physicians often have an “adaptive character trait of compulsiveness” that can edge into workaholism.
It’s time for doctors to be as compulsive about managing their stress as they are about their jobs.
