One of the fundamental tenets of medicine has been the centrality of the profession as a life calling; physicians work long hours and routinely sacrifice personal interests for professional demands. In 1993, only 13% of clinical faculty and 6% of basic science faculty members of U.S. medical schools worked part-time. 1 Historically, female physicians have been more likely than their male counterparts to work less than full time. Yet, despite increasing numbers of women in medicine and increased interest in personal time for self and family, U.S. medical workforce projections have forecast only a 3% decrease in the anticipated full-time equivalent of physicians over the next 10 years. 2 Trends in the general workforce provide a backdrop for changes in U.S. physicians' work hours. Over the past 20 years, full-time employment of women has increased 46%, while part-time employment has increased 88%. In 1988, women were 67% of the parttime labor force and 40% of the full-time labor force in the United States. 3,4 The percentage of women in the first year classes of U.S. medical students increased nationwide throughout the 1990s. These trends would indicate that an increase in interest in part-time work is likely to occur among U.S. physicians.The Netherlands has a health care system that includes prepaid and fee-for-service health care as well as Supported by grants from:
This method of examining medical students' abilities to obtain informed consent has several positive features and holds promise as an ethics competence assessment tool.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.