The Current Situations and Problems of Family Physicians in the Province of Kayseri and Their Views about the Family Medicine System

Objective: The purpose of the study is to determine the current situations and views of family physicians in Kayseri province about the family medicine system. Materials and Methods: This study, carried out in Kayseri province in 2012, administered a questionnaire to 325 family physicians. Results: The top reasons for preferring to be a family physician are the desire to be in the new system, high income, and the view that it is more prestigious than being a general practitioner. Also, 44.9% of the physicians stated that they were worried about the exit of enrolled people from their list, and 42.8% of them stated they are worried about other physicians’ desire to take their population; 63.8% of them stated that the system caused moral corruption, and 43.3% of them stated that it ruined the team approach. Almost half of the physicians (45.9%) stated that the family medicine system caused anxiety for the future, and 42.3% of them mentioned that it affected their personal rights negatively. The physicians claimed a mostly unnecessary medical report (92.5%), prescribing medicine without seeing the patient, and facing requests of prescribing unnecessary medicaments as problems. One-third of the physicians believed that the system increased drug consumption. The rate of physicians who believed that the system increased workload was 73.0%; 52.7% of the physicians were content with working in the family medicine sys¬tem. The only factor affecting the contentment of the physicians with working in the system according to the logistic regression analysis was thinking that it was prestigious to work as family physicians. Conclusion: Half of the physicians were satisfied with working in the system. They thought of the improvement of factors pro¬viding patient satisfaction as a positive aspect of the system and an increasing work load, corruption, and the increase in the use of medicaments as negative aspects.