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homechick posted an update Thursday, Sep 15, 2016, 1:42pm EDT, 7 years, 8 months ago
Re PAs vs. doctors. My really BIG pet peeve nowadays is when you have to be admitted to the hospital and your own doctor, who you've been seeing for over 20 years, doesn't come to see you any more. Instead, you are dealt with in hospital by what is now called a "hospitalist", a strange doctor you've never met before and who knows nothing about you. When I asked, I was told it's all in an effort to free up your doctor's time to see patients in his office. Well, that's all well and good, but when you're in the hospital and need your doctor maybe more than any other time, suddenly you have to deal with a stranger who doesn't even work directly with that hospital but is contracted through a third party outfit. The last 2 times my DH was in the hospital we we were confronted with this. I called over to the doctor's office and fussed about it and was told it was a "new method". PAs are also used in an effort to save doctor time so what does that leave the doctor doing? In our case, he seems to concentrate on annual physicals which have to be scheduled way in advance. If you get sick or hospitalized and need to be seen right away, here, at least, you can't see your own doctor. We've seen some good PAs who are building up practices of their own but they're simply not as educated as an MD. Guess you can tell it bugs me. BIL just had triply bypass surgery in Houston last Monday. He hadn't been in a hospital for a long time and was shocked to be attended, after surgery, by a doctor he'd never met before.