How to Preserve Your Doctor-Patient Relationship

Kaiser Health News recently offered a word of advice regarding patient-doctor relationships: It’s important to maintain that relationship by actually seeing your doctor regularly. Why? Because if you do not see your doctor for, say, a couple of years or so, you could be unceremoniously dropped as an active patient and be unable to “reactivate” yourself with that same doctor. This can occur if he or she is not accepting new patients, and you could be considered “new.” What’s more, in some cases, you may not even be forewarned that you’ve been made inactive and might learn it only when trying to make an appointment. How different doctors handle this varies from one to another. American Medical Association ethics guidelines recommend physicians provide advance notice if they are deactivating a patient relationship, but this notice is not binding. The problem has become more prevalent as physicians experience increased workloads in a post-pandemic world and as the country faces a physician shortage, both of which contribute to medical professional burnout.