Blogs
- Home
- /
- Blogs
Difficulties faced by doctors
Doctors, like all of us, face many problems. They have many responsibilities, from the health and well being of their own family, to the health and in some cases, life of patients. In this article, we are trying to highlight 5 problems that doctors face more often that you think.
- Lack of time for their patients. The burdens of documentation and other administrative work take up a lot of a physician’s time. This cuts into the time they need to attend to their patients. So, the doctor has very little time for his/her patients. According to a study, physicians spent only 27% of their shift with their patients, and nearly 50% of the time is spent in doing administrative work.
- Social, political and economic barriers often don’t allow doctors to treat those who are in desperate need. However, these factors are beyond the doctors control. In some under-developed countries it could simply be because of a lack of healthcare infrastructure. In other countries, the reasons could be because there are a lot more patients than doctors, and in these cases, it could be very hard to treat everyone.
- Doctors also have to deal with a lot of stress and work pressure. This is mainly because of the workload and imbalance in work-life, compassion fatigue or burnout, dealing with complaints, criticism, discrimination, making mistakes, etc. All these add stress to a doctors life. Research shows that the rate of suicide among physicians is higher than average.
- Another problem that doctors face is the frustration of not having a cure for every disease. Especially during outbreaks, epidemics, pandemics, etc., doctors have to deal with a lot of cases of an infection and the fact that they aren’t able to find a vaccine or a cure for this can be very stressful and frustrating.
- Assume you are a doctor and your are trying to save one of your patient’s life. You study the patient’s case and you know that the only way you can save this patient is by doing something that is out of the ordinary, something that many doctors would say is risky or dangerous. This is where ethics come in. Doctors have to make sure that their procedures are correct and ethical as well. Often it can be stressful for a physician because they have to pick between ethics and the life of a patient.