December 2nd, 2011 by Nicholas Genes, M.D., Ph.D. in Opinion
No Comments »
I had a couple of slow shifts in the emergency department recently, around Thanksgiving. And it made me think of Nomar Garciaparra, the old Red Sox shortstop.
Nomar always had to throw off-balance, while running and jumping. You can see his style on display when throwing the ceremonial first pitch at Fenway last year.
In an interview (can’t find the reference, sorry) he said he always had to throw this frenzied manner, even for an easy grounder where he’d normally have time to collect himself. If he paused too long to think about it, the throw would come off badly, he said.
I always thought this was a psychological issue — dubbed Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Blogborygmi*
November 6th, 2011 by DrWes in Health Policy, Opinion
No Comments »
Like Christmas season advertising, the holiday crunch for procedural medicine is coming earlier every year.
Perhaps that’s why the posting on this blog as suffered: we’re busier than ever.
Why is this?
I suspect it’s because of a variety of forces that are coming together to create the great procedural “perfect storm” this time of year.
Perhaps the most important contributor to the holiday rush is the patients themselves. Patients are Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Dr. Wes*
May 12th, 2010 by KevinMD in Better Health Network, Health Policy, Research
No Comments »
There’s been a lot of commentary on a recent article from the New England Journal of Medicine, detailing the undocumented tasks that a typical primary care physician performs.
For those who haven’t read the piece, entitled, What’s Keeping Us So Busy in Primary Care? A Snapshot from One Practice, it’s available free at the NEJM website. I highly recommend it.
To summarize, primary care doctors are responsible for much more than seeing patients in the exam room. In the cited practice, which has a fairly typical makeup, physicians were responsible for an average of over 23 telephone calls and 16 e-mails per day. Many practices don’t engage their patients over e-mail, so it’s conceivable that the number of telephone calls is lower than average here. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at KevinMD.com*
