Factors associated with office-basede physicians' career satisfaction
Date Issued
2004
Date
2004
Author(s)
Lee, Hsiang
DOI
zh-TW
Abstract
ABSTRACT
The World Health Organization (WHO) draws up the Chapter of All-Person Health in an attempt to enhance public health by thoroughly materializing the medical care at the grass-roots level. The office-based level medical care has been, as a result, deemed to play a important role in safeguarding public health. In Taiwan in the wake of the significant transformation in various phases, doctors and physicians in practice are at the level of that in advanced developed countries in terms of the choice available to them in the professional practice. The National Health Insurance policy, which has been put into enforcement recently, has cast an extremely significant impact upon doctors in their career prospects. In recent years in Taiwan, the consortium have been trying hard to give a hand in the medical care industry in an attempt to gain profits. The doctors in Taiwan must be increasingly subject to the interference by the external environments. On the other hand, nevertheless, the overall closed type medical treatment structure remains unchanged. As a result, once a doctor chooses to practice in the clinic, he/she can hardly get in touch with hospitals. In fact, hospitals enjoy the most up-to-date medical resources and technology which those people in hospital management are reluctant to get down to the office-based level doctors. As a discouraging result, the office-based level doctors can hardly win public trust in terms of the quality of their services and, in turn, can hardly get their professionalism upgraded in line with the times. That means a rise of the medical care costs on the one hand and a waste of office-based level doctor resources, leaving patients puzzled amidst hospitals without comprehensive overall care. In the eyes of the hospital management, patients mean the very sources of their revenues. Patients are arranged to receive repeated and repeated diagnoses and outpatient treatments. Under such environment of the medical care being out of balance, how can the expenditures for medical care costs possibly come down? In fact, only wholesome office-based level medical care will be the very tool to safeguard public health and bring the medical care cost down.
In their professional careers, will doctors choose to continually serve with hospitals or choose to serve patients at the office-based level? To answer this question, there have been many theoretical and empirical studies conducted either in Taiwan and the world over. To doctors who choose to serve patients at the office-based level, are they satisfied with their profession? What is their physical and mental status amidst the profession? There have been rare studies to answer such questions. With numerous factors against practice at office-based level clinics, are doctors serving with the office-based level clinics healthy enough to deal with all those pressures and to tackle such challenges? Are the doctors satisfied enough with the profession to live up to the expectation when they chose such kind of practice?
The Study takes 8,925 clinics selected out of the office-based level clinics (excluding Chinese herbal clinics and older than 70 years old clinic in charge doctors) accredited with the Department of Health (DOH) in 2002 as the samples. The questionnaire was designed to be aimed at the individual backgrounds, experiences accumulated before they practiced as a doctor, status quo of the professional practice and health conditions as the independent variables and level of satisfaction in the profession as the dependent variables. A total of 1,132 copies of the questions were successfully retrieved. The rough estimate indicates that 5% of the questionnaires failed to reach the target samples. The questionnaires indicate a successful retrieval rate of 13.4%. The findings yielded through the study indicate that in personal backgrounds, doctors serving at their own individual clinics and serving in concerted clinics responded with higher satisfaction level than doctors being hired. Doctors of younger age groups show higher satisfaction levels than their senior counterparts. Doctors who had headed the hospitals’ departments or sections before the professional practice responded with a higher satisfaction level. In their current professional practice, those who chose to serve in the office based level not in financial income consideration and those who are serving in the departments the same as the specialists in the resident training respond with a higher satisfaction level. In the scores rated in the three aspects, those doctors that are healthier, with higher scores respond with higher satisfaction level than their counterparts with lower scores and that are less healthy.
The final analysis of the study indicates that doctors in healthier physical conditions, having headed departments or sections in hospitals, serving in the categories the same as their previous internship training, free of financial pressure, serving in concerted clinics, still as a junior show a higher satisfaction level at the office-based services.
Subjects
基層診所醫師
生涯滿意度
Office-based physician
career satisfaction
SDGs
Type
thesis
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