Survey Results Indicate U.S. Doctors are Discouraged

TAMPA, Fla. -- Doctors are exhausted. They're burned out. The stress of their work is causing marital and family discord. And more than half of the physicians who participated in a recent survey are so fed up that they have considered leaving the practice of medicine altogether. Those are just a few of the findings of the 2006 American College of Physician Executives (ACPE)'s Physician Morale Survey. The survey findings are being reported in the November/December issue of the Physician Executive Journal of Medical Management.

Here's a sampling of what the survey found:

-- Nearly 60 percent of the 1,205 physicians who participated in the survey have considered leaving the practice of medicine because they're discouraged over the state of U.S. healthcare today.

-- Almost 70 percent said they actually knew of at least one doctor who stopped practicing medicine due to low morale.

-- The top five factors contributing to low morale were identified by the survey respondents as: low reimbursement, loss of autonomy, bureaucratic red tape, patient overload and loss of respect.

-- How is the low morale affecting physicians? The doctors in the survey listed fatigue as the number one problem, coming in at 77 percent. Emotional burnout, 66 percent, was

a close second. Both marital or family discord and depression were experienced by about 32 percent of the respondents and 4 percent have had suicidal thoughts.

Some physicians who took the survey are resigned to the idea that low morale is here to stay. "I think that it is safe to say that no physician is optimistic about the future of medicine at this point," one participant wrote. Others seemed downright hopeless: "One thing that rarely gets mentioned is that, unlike other industries that are cyclical, the practice of medicine continually gets worse and worse, more intolerable, more onerous, with absolutely no hope or reason for any optimism either in the near or remote future."

Source: ACPE

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