I gave my 3 month notice about 4 months ago now. It was clear that the rural hospitalist program in which I worked was not going to continue to be my happy place. (Corporate medicine, hospital acquiring outpatient practices, staff changes, politics, health care trends leading to everything progressively sucking, see prior blog post ...) What next? First, I could do exactly what I was doing a few years ago (filling in at hospitals in need all over the region), without working at my local hospital. I could go to the hospitals I knew well in neighboring states and do hospitalist shifts as a locum tenens physician. I could even sign up for regular part time work, say 7 days a month of either 12 or 24 hour shifts, somewhere within a day's drive of where I live. The money would be good and the time off pretty well uninterrupted with adequate blocks of time to travel and teach ultrasound. Sounds great, except for that week. Seven days of high stress, being away from home, the likeliho...
The cost of health care in the US is higher than anywhere else in the world, and yet we are not healthier than our peer nations. In fact, in terms of such measures as infant mortality and life span, we don't measure up. Why is this? Many people involved in providing or receiving care have some pretty good ideas about what costs so much, and what we can do to reduce costs and improve quality. Sharing these stories is an important step in creating affordable universal health care.