WORKFORCE SURVEY Oregon Physician Workforce Survey, Health Care Issues and Physician Well-Being Brief By Charles Gallia, PhD, and Rusha Grinstead MS, MPH, Oregon Health Authority IN THE PREVIOUS MEDICINE IN OREGON, we provided some background and results from the 2014 Physician Workforce Survey and highlighted Medicare information. In this issue, we will look at the importance of health care issues and take a first look at a question we added on physician wellbeing. Figure 1 shows the top five most important issues from 2014 compared to results from previous years. In 2014, job burnout and stress moved to the top of the list of issues that physicians thought were important. Moreover, the issue increased importance by almost 20 percent over the previous results. There were large increases in the importance of retention and recruitment of physicians as well. These differences prompted us to look closer at career satisfaction in the last 12 months in 2014 and compare that to 2012. (See Figure 2.) The proportion of physicians who indicated they were somewhat or very satisfied with their careers in the last 12 months has declined since 2012. Those reporting being somewhat or very satisfied in 2014 was 68 percent, compared to 74 percent in 2012. The percent being somewhat or very dissatisfied, as one would expect, went from 19.6 percent in 2012 to 25.4 percent in 2014. At the encouragement of the OMA, we included in the 2014 survey two related open-ended questions and placed them at the end of the survey: Œ Do you have any particular concerns about physician well-being? Recruitment of physicians Medicare reimbursement Impacts of health care reform Retention of physicians Figure 1 Œ What one thing might improve your practice and keep you practicing? Typically, open-ended questions do not get a lot of responses, nor do questions that are at the end of a survey. Of the 2,310 respondents, 1,034 physicians responded to the well-being question. We’ll discuss the implications of the second question at a future point. 69.0% 74.0% 76.0% 56.2% The following are the top ten categories from the responses to the question regarding concerns about physician wellbeing based on their association with career satisfaction: Œ Inadequate patient support Œ Staffing issues Œ Issues with colleagues Œ System problems 24 Medicine in Oregon www.TheOMA.org Figure 2 Career Satisfaction Over the Last 12 months 78.0% 69.0% 61.3% 72.9% 65.5% 43.6% 60.5% 70.3% 78.6% 39.0% Job-related stress and burnout 2009 2012 2014
OMA Medicine in Oregon Fall 2015
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