A survey of Papua New Guinean private medical practitioners

A postal survey of all Papua New Guinean private medical practitioners was conducted to ascertain their practice characteristics, how well they kept up with current medical knowledge and whether they were interested in contributing to public sector medicine. Replies were received from 44% of the doctors, who mostly represented the younger age group of graduates. The majority of the responders had entered private practice since 1981, were self-employed and made little use of existing opportunities for keeping up to date with medical knowledge. The average number of patients seen in a day showed a normal distribution with a peak at 20-29 patients per day. Over 75% of the responders stated that they would be willing to work for the government health services on a sessional basis at an average minimum hourly rate of K40. Financial reasons were given as the main justification for leaving government service. When asked whether they would return to full-time public service if doctors' terms and conditions improved, the private practitioners were evenly divided. Those interested in returning would expect an average annual salary of approximately K30,000 per annum. In this paper we argue that private medical care has so far been allowed to develop without guidance and controls, and little use has been made of it to support government health services. Escalating shortages of financial and human resources have now made it imperative to find innovative ways of developing both services in harmony with each other so that private medical services for the mostly urban minority will not grow to the detriment of public medical services for the rural majority.