Question

One of the key players in healthcare is the provider. This is the person who actually diagnoses and treats the patient. Recently there have been reports of a shortage in this group of professionals. This shortage is expected to grow threatening the ability of patients to access needed care. Many reasons have been provided for this shortage. This will be the topic of this week's unit. We will discuss what a shortage is. We will look at the market for physician services. We will look at the consequences of this shortage. We will discuss how malpractice claims are contributing to the problem. We will also examine the impact of the nursing shortage on the lack of providers.

Answer 1

Providers are always called the brain of the hospitals and nurses are the heart of the hospitals both must be sufficient hand in hand to provide the collaborative, comprehensive holistic care to the patients when the ration of provider and patient is being hindered it leads to serious problems.

Shortage is a state or a situation in which something needed is not being obtained in the sufficient amount.

A physician shortage is a situation in which there are not enough physicians to treat all the patients in need of medical care. The market for physician services are on high as the population visits for the consultation of various issues and first aid which would include rehabilitation, providing non self administrative drugs and other biological and so on. Hence there is a high demand rate for the physician services. When the services are not given by the physician due to shortage there would be lot of consequences including:

# patient would experience longer wait Times at hospitals,which in turn becomes more difficult for patients to be admitted.

# physicians would not be able to adequately treat patients due to the extended shifts and overload.

# over all health quality reduction

# the trust on health care system would be lost

# timely care and treatment would be delayed which makes the individual health fatal.

The other cause of physician shortage would be malpractice were lot of PA and NP work outside their scope and prescribe medication without proper diagnosis and investigation, were in the physician recruitment or employment would be at stake. The medical degree would be a fraudulent were by doesn't allow the medical practitioner on his position.

As discussed in the beginning physician and nurses must go hand in hand as they are also two faces of same coin. When there is shortage of physician the nursing shortage would be on rise as they depend and follow on their physician. As such nurses will be needed to educate and care for patients with various chronic conditions such as diabetes, arthritis and so on. Due to shortage of providers nurses often need to work long hours under very stressful conditions as there are no enough nurses too which can result in fatigue, injury and job dissatisfaction. They are also tend to make more medical errors.

Thus the providers and nurses must be on place with the population ratio to benefit the country with health and to eradicate infirmity at best possible.