Pushed to Their Limits, 1 in 5 Physicians Intends to Leave Practice

Abbasi J.

JAMA. Published online March 30, 2022.

doi:10.1001/jama.2022.5074

Here is an excerpt:

Worsening staffing issues are now the biggest stressor for clinicians. Health care worker shortages, especially in rural and otherwise underserved areas of the country, have reached critical and unsustainable levels, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).

“The evidence shows that health workers have been leaving the workforce at an alarming rate over the past 2 years,” Thomas R. Cunningham, PhD, a senior behavioral scientist at NIOSH, wrote in a statement emailed to JAMA.

In the absence of national data, Etz says the Green Center data point to a meaningful reduction in the primary care workforce during the pandemic. In the February 2022 survey, 62% of 847 clinicians had personal knowledge of other primary care clinicians who retired early or quit during the pandemic and 29% knew of practices that had closed up shop. That’s on top of a preexisting shortage of general and family medicine physicians. “I think we have a platform that is collapsed, and we haven’t recognized it yet,” Etz said.

In fact, surveys indicate that a “great clinician resignation” lies ahead. A quarter of clinicians said they planned to leave primary care within 3 years in Etz’s February survey. The Coping With COVID study predicts a more widespread clinician exodus: in the pandemic’s first year, 23.8% of the more than 9000 physicians from various disciplines in the study and 40% of 2301 nurses planned to exit their practice in the next 2 years. (The Coping With COVID study was funded by the American Medical Association, the publisher of JAMA.)

A lesson that’s been underscored during the pandemic is that physician wellness has a lot to do with other health workers’ satisfaction. “The ‘great resignation’ is affecting a lot of our staff, who don’t feel necessarily cared for by their organizations,” Linzer said. “The staff are leaving, which leaves the physicians to do more nonphysician work. So really, in order to solve this, we need to pay attention to all of our health care workers.”

Nurses who said they intended to leave their positions within 6 months cited 3 main drivers in an American Nurses Foundation survey: work negatively affecting their health and well-being, insufficient staffing, and a lack of employer support during the pandemic.

“Health care is a team sport,” L. Casey Chosewood, MD, MPH, director of the NIOSH Office for Total Worker Health, wrote in the agency’s emailed statement. “When nurses and other support personnel are under tremendous strain or not able to perform at optimal levels, or when staffing is inadequate, the impact flows both upstream to physicians who then face a heavier workload and loss of efficiency, and downstream impacting patient care and treatment outcomes.”

The info is here.

Sen. Kelly Loeffler Dumped Millions in Stock After Coronavirus Briefing

L. Markay, W. Bredderman, & S. Bordy
thedailybeast.com
Updated 20 March 20

The Senate’s newest member sold off seven figures’ worth of stock holdings in the days and weeks after a private, all-senators meeting on the novel coronavirus that subsequently hammered U.S. equities.

Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) reported the first sale of stock jointly owned by her and her husband on Jan. 24, the very day that her committee, the Senate Health Committee, hosted a private, all-senators briefing from administration officials, including the CDC director and Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, on the coronavirus.

“Appreciate today’s briefing from the President’s top health officials on the novel coronavirus outbreak,” she tweeted about the briefing at the time.

That first transaction was a sale of stock in the company Resideo Technologies valued at between $50,001 and $100,000. The company’s stock price has fallen by more than half since then, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average overall has shed approximately 10,000 points, dropping about a third of its value.

It was the first of 29 stock transactions that Loeffler and her husband made through mid-February, all but two of which were sales. One of Loeffler’s two purchases was stock worth between $100,000 and $250,000 in Citrix, a technology company that offers teleworking software and which has seen a small bump in its stock price since Loeffler bought in as a result of coronavirus-induced market turmoil.

The info is here.

Burr moves to quell fallout from stock sales with request for Ethics probe

Jack Brewster
politico.com
Originally posted 20 March 20

Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) on Friday asked the Senate Ethics Committee to review stock sales he made weeks before the markets began to tank in response to the coronavirus pandemic — a move designed to limit the fallout from an intensifying political crisis.

Burr, who chairs the powerful Senate Intelligence Committee, defended the sales, saying he “relied solely on public news reports to guide my decision regarding the sale of stocks" and disputed the notion he used information that he was privy to during classified briefings on the novel coronavirus. Burr specifically name-checked CNBC’s daily health and science reporting from its Asia bureau.

“Understanding the assumption many could make in hindsight however, I spoke this morning with the chairman of the Senate Ethics Committee and asked him to open a complete review of the matter with full transparency,” Burr said in a statement.

Burr, who is retiring at the end of 2022, has faced calls to resign from across the ideological spectrum since ProPublica reported Thursday that he dumped between $628,000 and $1.72 million of his holdings on Feb. 13 in 33 different transactions — a week before the stock market began plummeting amid fears of the coronavirus spreading in the U.S.

The info is here.

Ethicists Resign to protest CIHR stance

By Tim Loughead
Canadian Medical Association Journal
Originally published July 16, 2014

Two medical ethicists have resigned from their advisory positions with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), marking the latest development in a long simmering dispute over the institute's lack of leadership with ethics expertise. Françoise Baylis, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Bioethics and Philosophy at Dalhousie University, Halifax, and Chris Kaposy, a professor of health care ethics at Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN), St. John's, both issued strongly worded letters accompanying their respective departures on June 16th and 24th.

The entire article is here.

New Orleans psychologist who made racist remarks resigns

PsychCrime Database
Originally published August 11, 2012

On May 23, 2012, the Jefferson Parish Public School System reported that Louisiana school psychologist Mark A. Traina resigned.

Traina had come under scrutiny the by the Parish due to the numerous racially inflammatory remarks he posted on his Twitter feed.

A week earlier, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) filed a complaint with the United States Department of Education Office of Civil Rights against the Jefferson Parish Public School System and the Jefferson Parish School Board on behalf of students of the parish, for discrimination on the basis of race and disability. The complaint specifically alleged that the district’s alternative school policies have resulted in black students making up 78 percent of all alternative school referrals even though they are only 46 percent of the district’s student population.

The entire story is here.

Harvard Psychologist Resigns

The Chronicle of Higher Education
by Tom Bartlett

Marc Hauser, PhD

Marc D. Hauser, the Harvard psychologist found responsible for eight counts of scientific misconduct by the university, has resigned, ending speculation about whether the embattled professor would return to campus this fall.

In a letter dated July 7, Mr. Hauser wrote to Michael D. Smith, Harvard's dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, that he was resigning effective August 1 because he had "some exciting opportunities in the private sector" and that he had been involved in some "extremely interesting and rewarding work focusing on the educational needs of at-risk teenagers."

The letter states that he may return to teaching and research "in the years to come." It does not mention the scandal that damaged his once-stellar reputation and stunned his colleagues in the field.

Last August, The Boston Globe reported that a university investigation had found Mr. Hauser guilty of misconduct, though the nature of that misconduct remained murky. The picture became somewhat clearer after Mr. Smith, the Harvard dean, sent a letter to faculty members saying that Mr. Hauser was "solely responsible" for eight instances of wrongdoing involving three published and five unpublished studies.

An internal document provided last August to The Chronicle by a former research assistant in Mr. Hauser's laboratory revealed how members of the lab believed Mr. Hauser was reporting faulty data and included e-mails demonstrating how he had pushed back when they had brought problems to his attention. Several lab members alerted the university's ombudsman, setting in motion an investigation that would lead to the seizure of computers and documents from Mr. Hauser's laboratory in the fall of 2007.

Read the entire article here.