Complete team staffing, turnover among team members, and panel overcapacity had strong, cumulative associations with burnout. Further research is needed to understand whether improvements in these factors would lower burnout.
A questionnaire was mailed to 300 Iowa family physicians to determine the influence of a prior psychiatric history on decision making. The response rate was 77%. Respondents were less likely to believe that a patient had serious illness when presenting with a severe headache or abdominal pain if the patient had a prior history of depression ( P Ͻ .05) or prior history of somatic complaints ( P Ͻ .05), compared with a patient with no past history. Respondents were less likely to report that they would order testing for a patient with headache or abdominal pain if the patient had a history of depression ( P Ͻ .05, P ؍ .08, respectively) or somatic complaints ( P Ͻ .01). Differences in likelihood of ordering tests were not significant after adjusting for differences in estimated probability of disease. We conclude that physicians respond differently to patients with psychiatric illness because of their estimation of pretest probability of disease rather than bias. We conclude that past psychiatric history influences physicians' estimation of disease presence and willingness to order tests.
Purpose: Appropriate delegation of clinical tasks from primary care providers (PCPs) to other team members may reduce employee burnout in primary care. However, (1) the extent to which delegation occurs within multidisciplinary teams, (2) factors associated with greater delegation, and (3) whether delegation is associated with burnout are all unknown.Methods: We performed a national cross-sectional survey of Veterans Affairs (VA) PCP-nurse dyads in Department of VA primary care clinics, 4 years into the VA's patient-centered medical home initiative. PCPs reported the extent to which they relied on other team members to complete 15 common primary care tasks; paired nurses reported how much they were relied on to complete the same tasks. A composite score of task delegation/reliance was developed by taking the average of the responses to the 15 questions. We performed multivariable regression to explore predictors of task delegation and burnout.
Results: Among 777 PCP-nurse dyads, PCPs reported delegating tasks less than nurses reported being relied on (PCP mean
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