If you’ve lived more than a year in Southern Maryland, you’re familiar with how difficult it can be to get in to see a doctor when you need one.
Parents have to schedule their children’s annual physical two months in advance. Getting an appointment to see a pediatrician if your child is ill commonly requires calling the office the minute the phone lines are on, waiting on endless redial, and then sitting on hold, all the while hoping there’s an appointment left by the time you get through so you don’t have to brave the line at an after hours clinic.
“Every pediatrician in the area is swamped,” said the receptionist at one Waldorf practice. “With all the new houses going up, there aren’t enough doctors.”
Adults routinely wait two days/weeks to see a doctor for illness, injury or testing. That is if, they can find an office with room to take new patients. And, when you do see the doctor, he or she is out of the exam room so quickly you hardly get the chance to understand the diagnosis, let alone remember the questions you wanted to ask.
If you’ve experienced these local medical issues, your reaction to the recent announcement from the Maryland Hospital Association (MHA) and State Medical Society that Southern Maryland is critically short of doctors would be a resounding, “Duh! We’ve known that for years.” Well, now we have numbers.
The recently released Maryland Physician Workforce Study reported that Southern Maryland has the most severe actual and projected shortages of doctors beyond any other area in the state.
“It is a silent crisis that grows in intensity every day,” said MHA President Cal Pierson. “If this shortage is not addressed promptly, patient care and access to care will suffer.”
If anyone had polled actual citizens attempting to get medical care from a Southern Maryland doctor, researchers would have discovered the crisis isn’t so silent.
Parents all over the region complain bitterly about the “stupidity” of the morning race for “sick appointments” for their ill or injured children. Adults rail against the receptionists for general practitioners who say the office “isn’t accepting new patients at this time”.
“Why are we spending all this money on a sports stadium, when the commissioners should spend it getting more doctors into the area?” protested one father of four. “What are they doing about it?”
According to the study, not only does Southern Maryland have critical shortages in almost all physician categories
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| Data courtesy MHA 2007. |
; but we also have the fewest primary car
