Fewer and fewer young doctors in Switzerland are choosing to become general practitioners. If this continues, the decline in the number of GPs could have a serious effect on health care, they warn.

• To better inform the general public of the situation, the association has launched a campaign demanding a change to health policy that encourages more students to embrace the profession.
• Only 10% of medicine students plan on careers as family doctors. By 2021, it is expected that 75 per cent will have retired.

• Dr Bruno Kissling, a family doctor maintains that he plans to work as long as he can, but retirement is on the cards for him too. “I’m 62… and I still really like to work. I can’t imagine retiring at 65, but I do plan to withdraw from professional life at 68. I think that at some point you run out of the energy, but not the desire, to work,” said Kissling.
• In an effort to cope with the lack of new blood, the Swiss association of family practitioners has launched its campaign to raise support for the initiative “Yes to GP medicine”.
• Kissling is also concerned about the pending shortage of doctors like himself. Although he doesn’t have a successor lined up, he does have a strategy.
• The idea is to merge his practice with those of interested colleagues so that they could expand their capacity while taking on young doctors, including those who want to work part time.
• Nevertheless, he believes that the older family doctors should get involved because it is difficult for new doctors to establish a group practice from scratch.

A people person

• Kissling says that he especially treasures the long-term relationships that a family doctor tends to have with his patients.
• In contrast, specialists see their patients in the short term.
• Accompanying people for 10 or 20 years of their lives is something that occurs only in primary care medicine.
• While many people spend their lunchtime consulting a menu, he is normally looking through his papers, looking after his administrative work.
• The most time-consuming part of this is responding to queries from insurance companies that want to know why he prescribed a certain medication or physiotherapy sessions.

Death and costs

• After dealing with his administrative duties, Kissling then starts making house calls, mostly at local retirement homes.
• “I could hand over that work to another doctor,” he admits, “but a long-term relationship implies working with patients until the end of their lives.”
• Death is a regular occurrence in this line of work.
• Kissling says that usually they find a way so that people pass away peacefully. If the patient is not suffering and is prepared to go, it’s not something that he find hard to handle.
• It is challenging, but also rather lovely to accompany people in this situation.
• Kissling does not believe that GPs are responsible for rising health costs, pointing the finger of blame squarely at the country’s hospitals.
• Our society does not want to consider how far we want to go with medical care.
• We can always find some other treatment and if you take it far enough you end up with clinical trials, where proven remedies are no longer the norm and where research begins. It is an expensive option and is that what we want?

http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss_news/Switzerland_faces_a_lack_of_new_GPs.html?cid=29901812