Time for Family Medicine to Stop Enabling a Dysfunctional Health Care System | Annals of Family Medicine

The patient needs that family physicians witness and strive to meet each day are immediate and personal.1 That immediacy, and directly knowing the individuals, families, and communities we serve over time, have impelled us to continue to do whatever it takes to be a force for integration in a disintegrating system.2 But in doing whatever it takes, we have enabled the larger system’s avarice and depersonalization to grow. We have unintentionally become part of the problem by holding together an unsustainable, unfair, and too often ineffective system.3 Every day we witness the needs of people we are no longer able to help, as we crank patients through and tick boxes to meet so-called productivity and quality metrics. This is a perfect recipe for the burnout, moral distress, and depersonalization that are rampant among clinicians, staff members, and patients.4-6 We can’t do it anymore.7-10 We are burned out, not as much by overwork as by under value—stuck in a system that asks us to meet

Time for Family Medicine to Stop Enabling a Dysfunctional Health Care System | Annals of Family Medicine Skip to main content Editorial Editorial Time for Family Medicine to Stop Enabling a Dysfunctional Health Care System Kurt C. Stange The Annals of Family Medicine May 2023, 21 (3) 202-204; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1370/afm.2981 Kurt C. Stange Center for Community Health Integration, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio MD, PhD Find this author on Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for this author on this site For correspondence: kcs{at}case.edu Article eLetters Info

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