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THE GREAT AMERICAN PHYSICIAN SURVEY
By: Sara Michael
Who is the modern American physician?
It’s a question that pop culture has done a lousy job answering over the years. Remember when Americans imagined the family physician as Marcus Welby, MD, the avuncular doctor who always had plenty of time for all his patients?
That was nice. But it was never really true, and for decades that image has been fading. Today, the public view of American doctors is probably closer to Gregory House: super smart and committed to quality care, but overstressed, grumpy, and unhappy.
But this image, too, is a distortion. Despite seemingly insurmountable frustrations, you’re not an unhappy bunch. As a group you’re pretty content with your lives and you like being physicians.
Here at Physicians Practice, we’ve been growing tired of half-baked caricatures of physicians; we knew that the real, modern American physician community is more complex and diverse, more like the rest of the American public than an upper crust elite standing apart, and we wanted to better understand you — and maybe help you better understand each other. We asked nearly 1,600 physicians about their outlook on work, life, politics, and family as part of our first-ever Great American Physician Survey.
What emerges from our data is a varied landscape of individuals, but also a group that is, for the most part, content.
(*Interested in looking at survey data broken out by gender, age, and region? Here are the stats you’ll need.)
You’d like more time with your family. You wish we had a better healthcare system. But most of you feel more rewarded by your work than burned out on it, and you strive with some success to find time for yourself and your family.
Click here for the full story.
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