National Doctor’s Day: Two Out of Three Doctors Prioritize Patients Over Family

National Doctor's Day is celebrated every year on the 1st of July to create awareness on their roles, contributions, and responsibilities. A doctor plays different roles – as a physician, family member and as a provider at home. Some doctors have patients as their priority. For others, their families are their priority. Many have taken medicine as their career to serve humanity. But for some, the reason is the economic independence that comes with the profession.

A poll was conducted by Curofy to understand more about the life of doctors and know their priorities. Doctors answered their priority – patients’, family or economic independence. Out of 1820 doctors who responded, 60.4% said that they prioritize their patients over everything else.

“Being a maxillofacial surgeon I mostly deal with smiles of my patients. It gives me immense pleasure to see them leave with a better and bigger smile that they came in with. So yes, I am very passionate about my work and my family time is very less, I cannot help it. My desire to help patients is way above,” said, Dr Gagan Sabharwal, Consultant, Fortis Healthcare.”

About 26.3% said that their priority is their family. Nearly 63 % of doctors stated that they would rather work in a private set up than at a corporate hospital.

Even though working in a hospital gives one economic security and stability, a large number of doctors prefer to go for private practice. Corporate hospitals judge doctors on new parameters, which may be completely independent of their skills.

Corporate hospitals have been accused of turning medicine into a business, because they look for patient satisfaction, and their feedback is a metric in itself. With the aim of providing patient satisfaction, giving handsome salaries to doctors and generating revenue.

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Doctors working in a private set up are given independence as well as control of their working hours. This independence allows physicians to determine their own courses of action regarding the hiring of staff and development of a successful practice.

“ There is better accessibility to patients in private practice,” said Dr Krishnakant Pandey, Medical Officer, North MCD. “ It’s a lot more comfortable for doctors even though there is less of infrastructure in private practice than in corporate hospitals.”

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Corporate hospitals treat patients as consumers. Many doctors still hold their patients above everything else and prefer to practice independently to serve them better.

Pawan Gupta, co-founder Curofy commented on this saying, “Doctors are largely misunderstood in our society. On the occasion of doctor’s day, we decided to understand our doctors better through this poll and the result clearly showed that physicians still hold up the sanctity of practicing medicine. We can only thank our doctors on this day for serving humanity selflessly.”



Source-Medindia