Patient Satisfaction

While teaching is not one of my job requirements anymore, patient satisfaction is. I like to think that I was nice and respectful to patients as an academician, but I’ve made one major change to my practice since moving to the community: I wear a white coat. For those of you who have never practiced medicine as a youngish female, introducing myself as “Dr. Van Leer” and having “Doctor” in bold on my nametag is not enough. Patients would complain to a nurse that they’ve never seen a doctor. I even had an old woman say to me after my initial introduction, “You’re adorable; now I’d like to see my doctor please.” I now use the white coat as another cue to show, “I’m your doctor.”

Salary

One of the biggest purported differences between academia and the community is compensation. I spent my first years as an attending being told repeatedly by co-workers how little we made. I heard about endless examples of easy money in the community. “I have a friend who works one week a month in rural Minnesota and makes as much as we do,” or, “In Texas, no one works for less than $$$ per hour.”

Physicians often equate job satisfaction with salary, but it is clearly a much more complicated equation—trigonometry as opposed to algebra.

I took a community job that offered a higher salary than my academic job; my weekly clinical hours were similar, with no academic responsibilities. I was finally going to get a taste of this community living that I’d heard so much about. It was somewhere in the middle of my third shift when one of my new co-workers started telling me about how little we make. “You can make $$$ if you go to Hospital X or $$$ if you go to Hospital Y.” How had I moved to the community and still found the lowest-paying hospital?

There will always be a higher salary or a lower patient load or a nicer physician lounge, but at what cost? Academia didn’t pay me well but offered a lot of personal satisfaction and professional growth opportunities; I was happy. Can you quantify how much happiness is worth? My new job is only a few minutes from my house. If I moved to a hospital 40 minutes away, how much more would I have to make to pay for that time difference? Physicians often equate job satisfaction with salary, but it is clearly a much more complicated equation—trigonometry as opposed to algebra.