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As an aspiring physical therapist in my 2nd year of my doctoral program, I took great interest and enjoyed reading “Primary Care 2.0: A Prospective Evaluation of a Novel Model of Advanced Team Care with Expanded Medical Assistant Support.” While the authors identify and discuss numerous study limitations, their findings have the potential to reshape and reimagine the structure of primary care practices in the future. Burnout is a significant problem across the health professions.
Multiple physical therapists (PTs) have shared that their workload can often be overwhelming due to limited collaboration and support. Fortunately, I completed a clinical rotation where PT assistants worked alongside PTs as part of an inter-professional team. This team-based approach seemed to noticeably improve clinic functioning as PTs were able to delegate certain tasks to PTAs. As a result, PTs were able to direct their attention to more complex patient care.
Efforts to holistically examine burnout should be a top priority across all health professions. Interdisciplinary healthcare team development has wide reaching benefits to not only improved patient outcomes, but also clinician wellbeing. Team development can help to improve work environment interpersonal relationships and clinic efficiency, which can ultimately reduce healthcare-related costs.
The authors clearly articulate that temporary transformation of a team-based model has minimal effects on both primary care physician burnout and patient outcomes. On an annual basis, consistent efforts are needed by healthcare leaders and individual employees to forge an environment that supports sustained team-based care. In the future, I would be interested to see if longitudinal studies demonstrate an inverse relationship between MA staffing ratio and primary care clinician burnout.
Thank you for sharing your insightful work and expanding my knowledge on this topic. I am eager to share these findings with my classmates and future colleagues to promote positive and sustained healthcare system change.
Sincerely,
Kyle MacMillan