Care's Discrepancy

Medical students around the nation are used to pressure. Having completed cutthroat premed classes, taking the grueling MCAT and spending months on essays upon essays, these kids are aware of what they’re getting themselves into. Once they gain admission, all the pressures that built up in their previous experiences seem to have a lingering effect, as the competitive nature of the field can become somewhat encompassing. In the end of course, medical students want to do their best to make sure they offer the best possible care to others (or at least we hope so.) After they gain admission, questions of what they plan on specializing in are almost automatic. Why work so hard and spend so much money if you’re not going to be good at one particular thing? Whatever the reasoning may be, these students are favoring specialization over primary care in numbers that have some questioning the possibility of a shortage of primary care doctors in the future. The two paths differ not only in their pay, but also their responsibilities. While specialty doctor visits are short and intense, primary care doctors are the gatekeepers to further care; focusing more on the person as a whole rather than one specific problem. The problem with less primary care doctors becomes more glaring when we notice that they average more patient visits per week over other specialized doctors (approximately 20 more visits per week.) The numbers speak for themselves: with fewer doctors forced to take more patients per week; quality of care and subsequent patient and even doctor satisfaction begin to decline. I cannot fault today’s medical students for pursuing specialization, but we must address the discrepancy with incentives for those students who choose to travel the road less traveled.