Primary Care Council

All patients deserve a caring and trusted primary care doctor, to provide essential preventive services and build a strong relationship with the patient. The RCA Primary Care Council brings together family practitioners, internal medicine physicians, patients, and others to advocate for accessible and patient-centered care.

Recent council actions include:

Creating a list of top do’s and don’t for primary care
Advocating for collaborative, high-quality primary care for all
Communicating with hospitalists to ensure that primary care doctors are notified when their patients enter the hospital

Improving communication between primary care and hospitals

Hospitals are not required to notify primary care doctors when their patients are admitted, and most of them don’t. Marginalizing primary care doctors can lead to harmful and unnecessary care, especially for elderly patients who may not understand the risks of the treatments they are being asked to consent to.

So primary care council co-chair Andy Lazris decided to do something about it. He’s working with officials at his local hospital and also putting pressure on the hospital from the outside, to get the hospital to make contact with patients’ primary care physician mandatory upon admission.

Although writing op-eds and letters might ruffle some feathers, putting public pressure on the hospital is essential, because Lazris knows hospital behavior will not change on its own. “The hospital has to compel its well-compensated hospitalists to contact primary care as part of their essential actions of the day,” he says, “Anything less than that is medically derelict.”

News

RCA doc calls out hospital for lack of communication

Most hospitals don’t contact primary care doctors when their patients are admitted, leading to unnecessary procedures and patient stress. This doctor is trying to change that.

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Primary Care Council

Help us bring primary care to all

Improving communication between primary care and hospitals

News

RCA doc calls out hospital for lack of communication

Leadership