Survey Shows How the Pandemic Adversely Affected Clinicians’ Safety-Net Practices
Survey findings published in Public Health Reports, the official journal of the U.S. Office of the Surgeon General, show the COVID-19 pandemic has been particularly harsh for low-income and racial and ethnic minority communities.
To conduct the survey, researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill collected responses from nearly 2,000 National Health Service Corps clinicians in 20 states during the first nine months of the pandemic.
The researchers found that clinicians who served outpatient practices at federally qualified health centers, tribal health centers, and community mental health and drug treatment centers experienced a disproportionate impact on their safety-net practices during the pandemic.
When it comes to specialty services, many physicians who could not perform work remotely saw a reduction in pay and temporary furloughs. In the study, 40% of dental health clinicians reported seeing such reductions.
The findings also showed that nearly half of the primary care clinicians did not have the option of relocating to a lower-risk area if they were serving a high-risk community.
Nearly all the physicians surveyed reported a lack of mental help support, and three-fourths of the participants were found to be at high risk for mental distress.
“We should anticipate that their mental health will worsen during the next few years, likely affecting their ability to meet their patients’ needs and their decisions about whether to remain in their practices,” wrote the researchers in the article.
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