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How do rural GPs' workloads and work activities differ with community size compared with metropolitan practice?
- Source :
- Australian Journal of Primary Health; Sep2012, Vol. 18 Issue 3, p228-233, 6p, 5 Charts
- Publication Year :
- 2012
-
Abstract
- Rural communities continue to experience shortages of doctors, placing increased work demands on the existing rural medical workforce. This paper investigates patterns of geographical variation in the workload and work activities of GPs by community size. Our data comes from wave 1 of the Medicine in Australia: Balancing Employment and Life longitudinal study, a national study of Australian doctors. Self-reported hours worked per usual week across eight workplace settings and on-call/ after-hours workload per usual week were analysed against seven community size categories. Our results showed that a GP's total hours worked per week consistently increases as community size decreases, ranging from 38.6 up to 45.6h in small communities, with most differences attributable to work activities of rural GPs in public hospitals. Higher on-call workload is also significantly associated with smaller rural communities, with the likelihood of GPs attending more than one callout per week ranging from 9% for metropolitan GPs up to 48-58% in small rural communities. Our study is the first to separate hours worked into different work activities whilst adjusting for community size and demographics, providing significantly greater insight to the increased hours worked, more diverse activities and significant after-hours demands experienced by current rural GPs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Subjects :
- GENERAL practitioners
AGE distribution
ANALYSIS of variance
COMMUNITY health services
COMPARATIVE studies
EPIDEMIOLOGY
FAMILY medicine
HOSPITAL emergency services
JOB descriptions
LONGITUDINAL method
PROBABILITY theory
PUBLIC hospitals
RESEARCH funding
RURAL health services
SELF-evaluation
SEX distribution
STATISTICS
URBAN health
EMPLOYEES' workload
LOGISTIC regression analysis
DATA analysis
MULTIPLE regression analysis
RESIDENTIAL patterns
SECONDARY analysis
STATISTICAL models
DESCRIPTIVE statistics
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 14487527
- Volume :
- 18
- Issue :
- 3
- Database :
- Complementary Index
- Journal :
- Australian Journal of Primary Health
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 78551860
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1071/PY11063