I have recently read a few post about health care reform and am inspired to add my half bit of information to the collective. Since graduating from medical school I have practiced my entire career as a primary care doctor in the beautiful western state of Montana. I have practiced in a group setting as well as helping start the first Hospitalist medicine program in a large hospital in Billings, Montana. I now practice as an emergency room provider and am by trade an internist.
I have gone from seeing physicians trained with a broad skill set, as they were trained when there were real "rotating internships" to becoming highly specialized. An article printed in a leading medical journal recently quoted dismal predictions and statistics about the number of medical students going into primary care.The broad skill set seems to be a thing of the past. Case in point. The physicians who used to staff the rural hospital in northeast montana where i first worked used to routinely perform c-sections, orthopedic surgeries, appendectomies, as well as see 20 to 30 primary care patients a day. I was informed to my amazement that their record keeping system " back in the day" consisted of a log book with which one could access
I have gone from seeing physicians trained with a broad skill set, as they were trained when there were real "rotating internships" to becoming highly specialized. An article printed in a leading medical journal recently quoted dismal predictions and statistics about the number of medical students going into primary care.The broad skill set seems to be a thing of the past. Case in point. The physicians who used to staff the rural hospital in northeast montana where i first worked used to routinely perform c-sections, orthopedic surgeries, appendectomies, as well as see 20 to 30 primary care patients a day. I was informed to my amazement that their record keeping system " back in the day" consisted of a log book with which one could access
information from many years back. The patients name went in the log book and next to it a diagnosis. That was record keeping back in the day. This allowed the physicans to see many patients and from what I hear provide very good health care. Tort wasn't an issue as these physicians who were concerned with caring for patients and not always pleasing the masses, were loved by their patients and community;a community they lived and died in. The community was made better by their presence and they were allowed to grow as professionals and acquire a wide range of skills. This is lacking in medicine these days and I think I have to agree with the recent New York Times article I read on health care reform by a seattle physican. We need to get back to basics and use what the great Thomas Paine refered to as " common sense".
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