In a recent NBC 5 Responds survey of more than 1,100 people in the Chicago area, 67% of respondents said they had trouble booking an appointment with their primary care doctor in the past year — and some of those people included doctors themselves.
“You happened to catch me at exactly the time that I was struggling with these care needs,” Carissa Tyo, and ER doctor and survey respondent old NBC 5 Responds. “And I think that it is a really important piece of the puzzle that we need to talk more about.” Said Dr. Tyo.
That’s because Dr. Tyo struggled to get an appointment with her own primary care physician when she experienced intermittent fevers and prolonged body aches that lasted for weeks. She eventually turned to an immediate care facility, hoping that’s where she could get the testing she thought she needed.
But that didn’t happen. The immediate care practitioner instead told Dr. Tyo — an emergency room doctor herself — to go to the emergency room.
“It Is defeatist for an emergency department doctor to present to an emergency department for what we ourselves would present as a non-emergent issue,” she said. “It feels like a failure.”
More than half of people who took NBC 5 Responds’ doctor appointment survey said they struggled to get a primary care appointment in the last year. PJ Randhawa has the story.
So, why can it be so difficult to get an appointment with a doctor? The National Center for Health Workforce Analysis projects America will have a shortage of more than 81,000 full-time physicians by 2035. A recent survey of medical professionals by Indeed points to “doctor burnout” as one reason for the shortfall.
Dr. Kristin Rosseau, a psychiatrist with U Chicago Medicine who treats doctors coping with the demands of their jobs, told NBC 5 Responds there’s an industry-wide staffing problem.
“Whether it’s nurses, whether it is physicians, and the people that are still working within the system are having to pick up the burden of that”, she said. “They feel the weight of that, and then their burnout is increasing.”
According to the American Medical Association, nearly 42% of physicians in 2025 reported experiencing at least one symptom of burnout. Dr. Rosseau says it’s causing some doctors to leave the profession altogether. “I have seen trainees that have chosen to leave their training, which is really devastating because these are individuals that have gone through four years of medical school, likely have very significant debt from medical school,” she said.
According to Dr. Rosseau, primary care physicians are among the ranks impacted the most by burnout due to a high volume of patients, lower compensation, and administrative work that requires time after hours.
The American Academy of Family Physicians agrees with these causes for burnout.
“People are tired of the administrative hassle that has grown and grown in the last 40 or 50 years,”Dr. Jen Brull of the AAFP explained, “To the point where they’re spending as much time completing charts or doing prior authorizations or fighting in other ways for their patient as they do in getting to see those patients.”
Click here to read the full results of our NBC 5 Responds survey.
