Patients are getting older with more chronic conditions and more urgent needs.
This increased complexity is challenging for family doctors.
They are not trained to deal with this level of complexity.
They are not paid for addressing this level of complexity.
So complex elderly patients go untreated and undiagnosed.
Is there a solution?
One suggestion was for family doctors to require an extra year of training?
But that might not fly. A very unpopular idea.
Nurse practitioners with much less training than family doctors must manage the same level of complexity.
One solution that we have promoted at RCM Health is collaboration. Family doctors working closely with specialists.
That has been our underlying mission from the day we started focusing on complexity 27 years ago.
Encourage effective collaboration between family doctors and specialists.
The funding has to be there.
The motivators have to be there.
The culture has to be there.
The technology has to be there.
If all these factors are integrated and implemented, then patient complexity as a problem is partially solved.
Happy to share our open secrets about managing complexity.
Just reach out.