Too much overtime and paperwork, too little digitization: employed physicians are frustrated, a new survey shows
The Corona pandemic has highlighted the importance of a functioning healthcare system, including dedicated employees, and has brought their working conditions into the focus of politics and the public. Nevertheless, the dissatisfaction of medical staff has not changed, as a new survey by the physicians’ union Marburger Bund (MB) shows. On the contrary: a quarter of employed physicians are now thinking of quitting their profession. With the last inquiry three years ago it had been somewhat more than a fifth. Most of the almost 8,500 participants this time work in hospitals. Six percent work in outpatient facilities and generally assess their situation somewhat better.
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Working hours, with many overtime hours and on-call duties, are a particular source of displeasure. According to the physicians, actual working hours – not those on paper – average 50 hours per week; one fifth work 60 hours or more. Nine out of ten of those surveyed would like to work a maximum of 48 hours. The collective bargaining agreement in municipal hospitals regularly provides for 40. In order to work less, more and more physicians are switching to part-time work, the union writes. Meanwhile, this is 31 percent compared to 26 percent in 2019. But even for this group, it is true: “By working part-time, employees often only ensure that they have at least one day off per week on a regular basis.”
Three hours of bureaucracy a day
Every employed physician works an average of six hours of overtime a week, and for nearly one in five, it’s ten to nineteen hours. Half receive time off in lieu, a quarter receive compensation, but another quarter go without, according to the Marburger Bund: “Hospitals thus profit to no small extent every day from the unpaid work of tens of thousands of doctors.” It is noted as positive that the electronic recording of working hours has increased compared to 2019; nevertheless, it covers less than half of the cases. The situation is much better in community hospitals, which the union attributes to its collective bargaining efforts.
The survey also maps staffing shortages. In the two years of the pandemic, of all times, one third of the respondents had observed job cuts. In private clinics, more than half expressed this view. Two thirds described staffing in the medical service as poor or “rather poor”. Under private sponsorship, the situation was again particularly unfortunate, with more than two-thirds saying this.
Much space in the survey is taken up by documenting and digitizing. On average, each physician needs three hours a day for administrative tasks, such as data entry. According to the MB, some of this work could also be done by ward secretaries or typists. Where this support exists, physicians would have “more time for their actual tasks in patient care”. Better equipment with information technology (IT) would be helpful, but this leaves much to be desired in the majority of hospitals.
“I’m actually a doctor with a passion”.
The so-called “MB Monitor 2022,” which the Institute for Quality Measurement and Evaluation prepared for the union, surveyed its members for the first time on their satisfaction with IT equipment in the workplace. Two-thirds expressed dissatisfaction or “rather dissatisfaction.” In outpatient facilities, however, more than half of physicians are satisfied. A majority of all respondents estimate the level of digitization as low or “rather low”. If new programs are purchased, physicians’ requirements are generally ignored. The applications do not seem to run particularly efficiently, because in 80 percent of cases identical data must be entered frequently or occasionally more than once.
Nearly three-quarters of respondents receive no IT training. At least, however, two-thirds are satisfied with data security, such as protection against cyberattacks. A large majority of the evaluation participants consider climate protection in the workplace to be important. However, concrete steps to achieve this only appear in individual examples, such as replacing anesthetic gases in anesthesia that damage the ozone layer. The savings potential is immense because there is a lot of unnecessary disposable material on the wards and because many energy-intensive devices run continuously, for example in radiology.
The physicians surveyed in May and June, half of whom were up to 40 years old, made great use of free text statements from their daily practice. For example, one said, “I’m actually a doctor with a passion, but under these conditions I can’t and don’t want to practice medicine anymore.” The work is not appreciated, the excessive pressure has made her and other colleagues sick: “And what do you constantly hear? ‘You’re a doctor and you have to put up with it.’ No, you don’t!”
The source used in the creation of a news story: https://www.faz.net
