Hospitals work with locum tenens physicians and advanced practitioners for several reasons. From filling gaps in scheduling to lowering readmission rates and fighting burnout, locum tenens is a great way to help facilities find coverage and secure fast quality care when and where it’s needed most.
Topics: hospital medicine, hospitalist, locum tenens, locums, Our Blog, physician, physician burnout
Coming up with the correct diagnosis a hundred percent of the time is not easy. In fact, it's downright impossible.
According to a recent study, more than 20% of patients seeking a second opinion at the Mayo Clinic were found to be misdiagnosed by their primary care provider (Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, April 4, 2017).
Topics: diagnosis and treatment, doctor-patient relationship, Dr. Ken's Corner, Dr. Ken Teufel, interim physicians, medicine, physician, second opinions
“First, do no harm.” It’s one of the most well-known oaths physicians take when they graduate from medical school. Unfortunately, physicians are often exempt from this statement when considering their own health. Not by their own choosing, but as a result of the culture of medicine in which they’re immersed.
Topics: burnout, depression, Our Blog, physician, physician depression, physician suicide
Congratulations on finishing medical school and your residency! That long-awaited time in your life is finally here. Now you’re saving lives while working full-time to pay back those large student loans. Here are some tips for balancing it all those first few years post-residency:
Topics: interim physicians, Our Blog, physician, physician news, traveling doctor, young physicians
Approximately 1% of all physicians account for 32% of paid malpractice claims (New England Journal of Medicine, January 28, 2016). Using the National Practitioner Data Bank as their resource, Stanford medical law expert David M. Studdert and his colleagues concluded that "a small number of physicians with distinctive characteristics accounted for a disproportionately large number of paid medical malpractice claims" from 2005 through 2014. Over this 10-year period, there were 66,427 claims paid against 54,099 physicians. A physician with three paid claims was found to have three times the risk of incurring another paid claim when compared to a physician who had only one previous claim. The vast majority of these claims were out-of-court settlements, and one-third involved alleged negligence leading to patient death.
Topics: doctor-patient relationship, Dr. Ken's Corner, Dr. Ken Teufel, interim physicians, locum tenens, locums physician, Malpractice, patient care, physician
Talk about physician burnout is rampant. Yet a majority of 4,600 physicians surveyed by Medscape say they're generally happy with their lives. Nearly 75% of doctors, whether self-employed or employed by others, expressed overall satisfaction with their work-life balance and income. Twenty percent were "neutral" while only 8% of employed doctors and 7% of those self-employed said they were dissatisfied with their situation.
Topics: burnout, Dr. Ken's Corner, locum tenens, medscape, myth, physician, physician burnout, reality
