|
|
 Canadian
Medical Association Journal
Home |
|
Pulse
The recently released CMA 2000 Physician Resource Questionnaire found that 76% of Canadian physicians regularly take or share call duties. Until they turn 65, age has little effect on the proportion of doctors who accept call. However, by the time they reach that late stage of their careers, only 50% of physicians are still taking call. Doctors younger than 35 are more likely to log more call hours in an average month: 22% of younger doctors reported working over 180 shared call hours per month (a schedule more frequent than 1 in 4), compared with an overall result of 16%.
Not surprisingly, rural doctors are more likely than their urban colleagues to put in more than 180 shared call hours per month (25% versus 15%). Surgical specialists are more than twice as likely to record more than 180 hours of shared call per month than are GP/FPs (27% vs. 13%); 15% of medical specialists reported more than 180 hours of shared call in an average month. Younger physicians and those in rural practice also tend to see more patients during their call rotations. Among physicians under age 35, 39% see more than 40 on-call patients per month. This proportion decreases consistently with age, with only 17% of physicians aged 65 and older treating more than 40 on-call patients per month. More than half (51%) of rural physicians report attending to more than 40 on-call patients per month, compared with 23% of their urban colleagues. Although the age-group differences lessen somewhat when one controls for total hours of shared call per month, rural doctors are consistently twice as likely as urban doctors to see more than 40 on-call patients per month, irrespective of the total number of shared call hours per month. — Shelley Martin, martis@cma.ca
Copyright 2000 Canadian Medical Association or its licensors |
