How many patients would a doctor see in their life?

Question

This is hypothetical, but if you can answer, can you show your working?

The response on this is fantastic, I really appreciate all those who had a crack at a hypothetical question. Thank you so much.

Answer 1

Hypothetically, 196,875 patient contacts, give or take. That's based on a primary care physician seeing 25 patients a day 4.5 days a week for 50 weeks a year, for 35 years. Obviously, most of those are repeat visits. Many doctors see fewer patients each day, some see more.

Calculating how many individual persons a physician sees during a lifetime is more complex.

Answer 2

Usually a family practice doctor keeps a panel of about 2000-3000 patients. Some of these die or move away or change doctors every year, and some new ones move into the practice, so maybe there's a changeover of about 10% or so . So start with 2500 and then add 250 new people for every year in practice. So if someone practiced for 40 years, they will have seen 10,500 patients. Of course they have probably seen each patient multiple times for various complaints, so there is a much higher number of patient visits than actual patients.

Answer 3

Some doctors can have zero to one patient a day. In other third world countries they can have as much as 30 a day or more if they are working in a goevernment institution. It varies widely depending on the situation as well as the skill of the doctor. Good doctrors tend to have more patients than other doctors.

Answer 4

Only one. The way the question is worded I would say that a patient only has one life ergo the doctor sees one patient.

Answer 5

I take care of about 800-1000 patients a year (roughly). I don't have a lot of repeat customers, so if I work for 35 years, I'll see approximately 280,000 - 350,000. Wow.