The doctors are not alright. Low pay, high workloads, and a labor shortage are all contributing to a burnout epidemic among American physicians, and it could spell disaster for health care, according to a new survey. Around 81% of doctors say they’re overworked in the 2024 Physician Compensation Report released today from Doximity , an online networking platform for medical professionals, and shared exclusively with Fortune .
Researchers polled 33,000 full-time U.S. physicians in 2023, and drew on data from thousands of other recent surveys.
Another 88% say the existing physician shortage is causing their practice to suffer, and 86% say they’re concerned about the American healthcare system’s ability to care for an aging population. Morale is so low that around 30% of doctors are considering early retirement—a potential disaster for a country in which 70% of people already feel like the health care system has failed them . “We find ourselves in a position where we are often stretched quite thin,” Dr.
Amit Phull, Doximity’s chief physician experience officer and an emergency medicine physician, tells Fortune . “I think as the [pandemic] dust settles, there’s a lot of reconsideration for folks who at the outset might have felt, ‘this is the place that I need to be, this is why I trained.’ They’re now reconsidering careers in medicine, in terms of the cost and the balance.
” Physicians have always had tough jobs, whether that means long hours, emotionall.
