In survey after survey medical patients always give their primary care doctors a thumbs up. They think overall their doctors do a great job and provide fantastic medical care.

If you ask most patients would they like to change their doctors, the vast majority would say no. However if you asked those same patients are there things about their doctor that they would like to change the vast majority would say absolutely.

Here are some of the biggest gripes that patients have about their primary care physicians.

Lack of quality time with the doctor

Doctors have busy schedules that demand that they see a lot of patients during the week. As a result most patients don’t get a lot of time with their doctors. The doctor will typically have several waiting rooms and in each room a nurse is tending to a patient. The doctor comes into the room, looks at the patient’s chart to see if anything is wrong, asks a series of questions of the patient, and is then off to the next patient’s room.

If the patient has any questions the doctor will try to answer them quickly. The total time the patient sees the doctor is usually less than 15 minutes. This can be fine if it’s just a normal checkup, but if the patient is having some particular problem and feels the doctor needs to give it more attention, it can be frustrating. So patients would like the opportunity to see their doctors longer during doctor visits.

Inconvenient office hours

Doctor’s usually keep the same office hours as most other businesses. This means that most people will have to take off work to visit the doctor which can be quite an inconvenience.  Many patients would love for doctors to stay open late and even on weekends so that they can see their doctor at a more convenient time.

Unclear instructions about medication

When a patient is given medication, the doctor will alert the patient as to how it should be taken, how often it should be taken, and any potential major side effects that the medication might cause. The patient uses this information as a guideline. Quite often, there may be additional side effects that occur when the patient takes the medication. This is because everyone is different and the exact effect of medication on a particular individual is hard to judge. The doctor will tell the patient the most likely side effects, but not every side effect that might occur. So if the patient has side effects that were not warned of by the doctor, the patient can get confused.

Long wait in the waiting room

Just about anyone can tell stories about how long they wait in their doctor’s waiting room. How many of the old dated magazines they had to read while they waited to see the doctor. In other words doctor waiting room times are legendary. It doesn’t matter which doctor you see or where you live in the country. Perhaps this is a class that’s taught in medical school. This is definitely an area for doctors to work on, because it will improve that happiness of their patients.

The best doctors make sure that none of these issues occur with their patients regularly. There are even physician’s clinics like Portland Oregon’s Aim Health that pride themselves on making sure patients never wait long and get all the time they need with their doctors for proper diagnosis and the best care.