Primary care physicians' perspectives on the identification and management of postnatal mental health problems.

BACKGROUND: Postnatal mental health problems (PMHPs) are prevalent and negatively affect mothers, children, and society. International and local guidelines recommend that Singapore primary care physicians (PCP) screen, assess, and manage mothers with PMHPs. However, little is known about their experiences and views. METHODS: We conducted semi-structured interviews with 14 PCPs in Singapore. Interview questions elicited perspectives on the identification and management of mothers with PMHPs. The interview guide was developed from a conceptual framework incorporating the knowledge-attitudes-practices, self-efficacy, and socio-ecological models. Interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. Thematic analysis was used to identify emergent themes. RESULTS: Singapore PCPs viewed themselves as key providers of first-contact care to mothers with PMHPs. They believed mothers preferred them to alternative providers because of greater accessibility and trust. In detection, they were vigilant in identifying at-risk mothers and favoured clinical intuition over screening tools. PCPs were confident in diagnosing common PMHPs and believed that mothers not meeting diagnostic criteria must be readily recognized and supported. In managing PMHPs, PCPs expressed varying confidence in prescribing antidepressants, which were viewed as second-line to supportive counselling and psychoeducation. Impeding physician factors, constraining practice characteristics and health system limitations were barriers. Looking forward, PCPs aspired to leverage technology and multidisciplinary teams to provide comprehensive, team-based care for the mother-child dyad. CONCLUSION: Singapore PCPs are key in identifying and managing mothers with PMHPs. To fully harness their potential in providing comprehensive care, PCPs need greater multidisciplinary support and technological solutions that promote remote disclosure and enhanced preparation for their role.

'Walking together': How relationships shape physicians' clinical reasoning.

INTRODUCTION: The clinical reasoning literature has increasingly considered context as an important influence on physicians' thinking. Physicians' relationships with patients, and their ongoing efforts to maintain these relationships, are important influences on how clinical reasoning is contextualised. The authors sought to understand how physicians' relationships with patients shaped their clinical reasoning. METHODS: Drawing from constructivist grounded theory, the authors conducted semi-structured interviews with primary care physicians. Participants were asked to reflect on recent challenging clinical experiences, and probing questions were used to explore how participants attended to or leveraged relationships in conjunction with their clinical reasoning. Using constant comparison, three investigators coded transcripts, organising the data into codes and conceptual categories. The research team drew from these codes and categories to develop theory about the phenomenon of interest. RESULTS: The authors interviewed 15 primary care physicians with a range of experience in practice and identified patient agency as a central influence on participants' clinical reasoning. Participants drew from and managed relationships with patients while attending to patients' agency in three ways. First, participants described how contextualised illness constructions enabled them to individualise their approaches to diagnosis and management. Second, participants managed tensions between enacting their typical approaches to clinical problems and adapting their approaches to foster ongoing relationships with patients. Finally, participants attended to relationships with patients' caregivers, seeing these individuals' contributions as important influences on how their clinical reasoning could be enacted within patients' unique social contexts. CONCLUSION: Clinical reasoning is influenced in important ways by physicians' efforts to both draw from, and maintain, their relationships with patients and patients' caregivers. Such efforts create tensions between their professional standards of care and their orientations toward patient-centredness. These influences of relationships on physicians' clinical reasoning have important implications for training and clinical practice.

Impacts of Operational Failures on Primary Care Physicians' Work: A Critical Interpretive Synthesis of the Literature.

PURPOSE: Operational failures are system-level errors in the supply of information, equipment, and materials to health care personnel. We aimed to review and synthesize the research literature to determine how operational failures in primary care affect the work of primary care physicians. METHODS: We conducted a critical interpretive synthesis. We searched 7 databases for papers published in English from database inception until October 2017 for primary research of any design that addressed problems interfering with primary care physicians' work. All potentially eligible titles/abstracts were screened by 1 reviewer; 30% were subject to second screening. We conducted an iterative critique, analysis, and synthesis of included studies. RESULTS: Our search retrieved 8,544 unique citations. Though no paper explicitly referred to "operational failures," we identified 95 papers that conformed to our general definition. The included studies show a gap between what physicians perceived they should be doing and what they were doing, which was strongly linked to operational failures-including those relating to technology, information, and coordination-over which physicians often had limited control. Operational failures actively configured physicians' work by requiring significant compensatory labor to deliver the goals of care. This labor was typically unaccounted for in scheduling or reward systems and had adverse consequences for physician and patient experience. CONCLUSIONS: Primary care physicians' efforts to compensate for suboptimal work systems are often concealed, risking an incomplete picture of the work they do and problems they routinely face. Future research must identify which operational failures are highest impact and tractable to improvement.

A scoping analysis of the aspects of primary healthcare physician job satisfaction: facets relevant to the Indonesian system.

BACKGROUND: Although there is extensive literature on the different aspects of physician job satisfaction worldwide, existing questionnaires used to measure job satisfaction in developed countries (e.g., the Job Satisfaction Scale) do not capture the aspects specific to Indonesian primary healthcare physicians. This is especially true considering the 2014 healthcare system reform, which led to the implementation of a national social health insurance scheme in Indonesia that has significantly changed the working conditions of physicians. Therefore, the current study aimed to identify aspects of primary care physician job satisfaction featured in published literature and determine those most suitable for measuring physician job satisfaction in light of Indonesia's recent reforms. METHODS: A scoping literature review of full-text articles published in English between 2006 and 2015 was conducted using the PubMed, Psycinfo, and Web of Science databases. All aspects of primary care physician job satisfaction included in these studies were identified and classified. We then selected aspects mentioned in more than 5% of the reviewed papers and identified those most relevant to the post-reform Indonesian context. RESULTS: A total of 440 articles were reviewed, from which 23 aspects of physicians' job satisfaction were extracted. Sixteen aspects were deemed relevant to the current Indonesian system: physical working conditions, overall job satisfaction, patient care/treatment, referral systems, relationships with colleagues, financial aspects, workload, time of work, recognition for good work, autonomy, opportunity to use abilities, relationships with patients, their families, and community, primary healthcare facilities' organization and management style, medical education, healthcare systems, and communication with health insurers. CONCLUSION: Considering the recent reforms of the Indonesian healthcare system, existing tools for measuring job satisfaction among physicians must be revised. Future research should focus on the development and validation of new measures of physician job satisfaction based on the aspects identified in this study.

Job satisfaction of the primary healthcare providers with expanded roles in the context of health service integration in rural China: a cross-sectional mixed methods study.

OBJECTIVE: Against the backdrop of integrating public health services and clinical services at primary healthcare (PHC) institutions, primary healthcare providers (PCPs) have taken on expanded roles. This posed a potential challenge to China as it may directly impact PCPs' workload, income, and perceived work autonomy, thus affecting their job satisfaction. This study aimed to explore the association between the expanded roles and job satisfaction of the PCPs in township healthcare centers (THCs), the rural PHC institutions in China. METHODS: A cross-sectional study using mixed methods was conducted in 47 THCs in China's Shandong province. Based on a sample of 1146 PCPs, the association between the proportion of PCPs' working time spent on public health services and PCPs' self-reported job satisfaction was estimated using the logistic regression. Qualitative data were also collected and analyzed to explore the mechanism of how the expanded roles impacted PCPs' job satisfaction. RESULTS: One hundred eighty-four physicians and 146 nurses undertook increased work responsibilities, accounting for 15.91% and 12.61% of the total sample. For those spending 40-60%, 60-80%, and more than 80% of the working time providing public health services, the time spent on public health was negatively associated with job satisfaction, with the odds ratio being 0.199 [0.067-0.587], 0.083 [0.025-0.276], and 0.030 [0.007-0.130], respectively. Qualitative analysis illustrated that a majority of the PCPs with expanded roles were dissatisfied with their jobs due to the heavy workload, the mismatch between the income and the workload, and the low level of work autonomy. PCPs' heavier work burden was mainly caused by the current public health service delivery policy and the separation of public health service delivery and regular clinical services delivery, a significant challenge undermining the efforts to better integrate public health services and clinical services at PHC institutions. CONCLUSION: The current policies of adding public health service delivery to the PHC system have negative impacts on PCPs' job satisfaction through increased work responsibilities for PCPs, which have led to low work autonomy and the mismatch between the income and the workload. The fundamental reason lies in the fragmented incentives and external supervision for public health service delivery and clinical service delivery. Policy-makers should balance the development of clinic and public health departments at the institutional level and integrate their financing and supervision at the system level so as to strengthen the synergy of public health service provision and routine clinical service provision.

Job satisfaction of public and private primary care physicians in Malaysia: analysis of findings from QUALICO-PC.

BACKGROUND: Job satisfaction of doctors is an important factor determining quality and performance of a health system. The aim of this study was to assess job satisfaction among doctors of the public and private primary care clinics in Malaysia and evaluate factors that could influence the job satisfaction rating. METHODS: This study was part of the Quality and Costs of Primary Care (QUALICOPC) Malaysia, a cross-sectional survey conducted between August 2015 and June 2016 in Malaysia. Data was collected from doctors recruited from public and private primary care clinics using a standardised questionnaire. Comparisons were made between doctors working in public and private clinics, and logistic regression analysis was used to determine factors influencing the likelihood of job satisfaction outcomes. RESULTS: A total of 221 doctors from the public and 239 doctors from the private sector completed the questionnaire. Compared to private doctors, a higher proportion of public doctors felt they were being overloaded with the administrative task (59.7% vs 36.0%) and part of the work does not make sense (33.9% vs 18.4%). Only 62.9% of public doctors felt that there was a good balance between effort and reward while a significantly higher proportion (85.8%) of private doctors reported the same. Over 80% of doctors in both sectors indicated continued interest in their job and agreed that being a doctor is a well-respected job. Logistic regression analysis showed public-private sector and practice location (urban-rural) to be significantly associated with work satisfaction outcomes. CONCLUSION: A higher proportion of public doctors experienced pressure from administrative tasks and felt that part of their work does not make sense than their colleague in the private sector. At the same time, the majority of private doctors reported positive outcome on effort-and-reward balance compared to only one third of public doctors. The finding suggests that decreasing administrative workload and enhancing work-based supports might be the most effective ways to improve job satisfaction of primary care doctors because these are some of the main aspects of the job that doctors, especially in public clinics, are most unhappy with.

[Peculiarities of post-graduate education of primary healthcare providers].

Positive emotional environment, adequately organized verbal and non-verbal communication are the primary components of post-graduate education of primary healthcare providers. The ability of teachers to activate relevant sensor channels in the listeners during lessons is an indispensable prerequisite for enhancing their learning and training skills.

Predicting Primary Care Physician Burnout From Electronic Health Record Use Measures.

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the ability of routinely collected electronic health record (EHR) use measures to predict clinical work units at increased risk of burnout and potentially most in need of targeted interventions. METHODS: In this observational study of primary care physicians, we compiled clinical workload and EHR efficiency measures, then linked these measures to 2 years of well-being surveys (using the Stanford Professional Fulfillment Index) conducted from April 1, 2019, through October 16, 2020. Physicians were grouped into training and confirmation data sets to develop predictive models for burnout. We used gradient boosting classifier and other prediction modeling algorithms to quantify the predictive performance by the area under the receiver operating characteristics curve (AUC). RESULTS: Of 278 invited physicians from across 60 clinics, 233 (84%) completed 396 surveys. Physicians were 67% women with a median age category of 45 to 49 years. Aggregate burnout score was in the high range (≥3.325/10) on 111 of 396 (28%) surveys. Gradient boosting classifier of EHR use measures to predict burnout achieved an AUC of 0.59 (95% CI, 0.48 to 0.77) and an area under the precision-recall curve of 0.29 (95% CI, 0.20 to 0.66). Other models' confirmation set AUCs ranged from 0.56 (random forest) to 0.66 (penalized linear regression followed by dichotomization). Among the most predictive features were physician age, team member contributions to notes, and orders placed with user-defined preferences. Clinic-level aggregate measures identified the top quartile of clinics with 56% sensitivity and 85% specificity. CONCLUSION: In a sample of primary care physicians, routinely collected EHR use measures demonstrated limited ability to predict individual burnout and moderate ability to identify high-risk clinics.

Primary Care Physician Preferences Regarding Communication from Orthopaedic Surgeons.

BACKGROUND: Musculoskeletal consultations constitute a growing portion of primary care physician (PCP) referrals. Optimizing communication between PCPs and orthopaedists can potentially reduce time spent in the electronic medical record (EMR) as well as physician burnout. Little is known about the preferences of PCPs regarding communication from orthopaedic surgeons. Hence, the present study investigated, across a large health network, the preferences of PCPs regarding communication from orthopaedists. METHODS: A total of 175 PCPs across 15 practices within our health network were surveyed. These providers universally utilized Epic as their EMR platform. Five-point, labeled Likert scales were utilized to assess the PCP-perceived importance of communication from orthopaedists in specific clinical scenarios. PCPs were further asked to report their preferred method of communication in each scenario and their overall interest in communication from orthopaedists. Logistic regression analyses were performed to determine whether any PCP characteristics were associated with the preferred method of communication and the overall PCP interest in communication from orthopaedists. RESULTS: A total of 107 PCPs (61.1%) responded to the survey. PCPs most commonly rated communication from orthopaedists as highly important in the scenario of an orthopaedist needing information from the PCP. In this scenario, PCPs preferred to receive an Epic Staff Message. Scenarios involving a recommendation for surgery, hospitalization, or a major clinical change were also rated as highly important. In these scenarios, an Epic CC'd Chart rather than a Staff Message was preferred. Increased after-hours EMR use was associated with diminished odds of having a high interest in communication from orthopaedists (odds ratio, 0.65; 95% confidence interval, 0.48 to 0.88; p = 0.005). Ninety-three PCPs (86.9%) reported spending 1 to 1.5 hours or more per day in Epic after normal clinical hours, and 27 (25.2%) spent >3 hours per day. Forty-six PCPs (43.0%) reported experiencing ≥1 symptom of burnout. CONCLUSIONS: There were distinct preferences among PCPs regarding clinical communication from orthopaedic surgeons. There was also evidence of substantial burnout and after-hours work effort by PCPs. These results may help to optimize communication between PCPs and orthopaedists while reducing the amount of time that PCPs spend in the EMR.

Percepções de gestores municipais de Saúde sobre o provimento e a atuação dos médicos do Programa Mais Médicos / Perceptions of city health managers about the provision and activity of physicians from the More Doctors Program / Percepciones de gestores municipales de Salud sobre la provisión y actuación de lós médicos del Programa Más Médicos

No Brasil, o desafio da redistribuição de médicos foi alvo de diversas intervenções governamentais. Objetivou-se analisar o provimento de médicos do Programa Mais Médicos, segundo as percepções de gestores municipais de Saúde. Trata-se de um estudo qualitativo realizado com 63 gestores em 32 municípios do Brasil. As entrevistas foram submetidas à análise de conteúdo com a ajuda do software ATLAS.ti. Destacam-se as contribuições dos médicos do programa na melhoria da Atenção à Saúde, nas práticas clínicas humanizadas e diferenciadas e nas mudanças na rede de Atenção à Saúde, após a implementação do programa. Os gestores reafirmam a importância da implementação, no que concerne ao provimento e à fixação de médicos na Atenção Básica, em municípios vulneráveis e de difícil acesso.

In Brazil, the challenge of redistributing physicians has been the subject of several government interventions. The objective of this paper was to analyze the provision of physicians through the More Doctors Program, according to city health managers. This was a qualitative study carried out with 63 managers in 32 Brazilian cities. The interviews were submitted to content analysis using Atlas.it software. It is noteworthy to highlight the contributions of the program physicians to improvements in health care, humanized and differentiated clinical practices, and changes to health care networks after implementation of the program. The managers reiterated the importance of the program in providing and securing physicians in primary health care in vulnerable and hard-to-access cities.

En Brasil, el desafío de la redistribución de médicos fue objeto de diversas intervenciones gubernamentales. El objetivo fue analizar la provisión de médicos del Programa Más Médicos, según las percepciones de gestores municipales de Salud. Se trata de un estudio cualitativo realizado con 63 gestores en 32 municipios de Brasil. Las entrevistas se sometieron a análisis de contenido con la ayuda del software Atlas.ti. Se subrayan las contribuciones de los médicos del programa en la mejora de la atención a la salud, en las prácticas clínicas humanizadas y diferenciadas y en los cambios en la red de atención a la salud, después de la implementación del Programa. Los gestores reafirman la importancia de la implementación del programa en lo que se refiere a la provisión y a la fijación de médicos en la atención básica en municipios vulnerables y de difícil acceso.