ST. GEORGE — A new study by a financial website says if a doctor is looking for the best medical environment to work in, Utah is the place.
In a study that considered 19 metrics based on opportunity, competition and medical environment in all 50 states, WalletHub ranked Utah first for medical environment.
The study, coinciding with National Doctors Day on March 30, is meant to rank the overall best and worst states for doctors to work in. The overall honor for best state for a doctor to work in went to Montana, followed by South Dakota. Utah ranked seventh overall.
But as far as one main metric is concerned – medical environment – Utah came out on top. And the criteria behind medical environment, including quality and safety, might also be considered favorable to patients.
“The criteria included the quality and safety of hospitals, the existence of nationally accredited health departments, the number of physician assistants, the punitiveness of the state medical board, malpractice payouts and insurance rates, and physician burnout,” WalletHub analyst Jill Gonzalez told St. George News in an email. “The metrics where Utah ranked best were the quality of the public hospital system, hospital safety and lack of physician burnout.”
However, Gonzalez said Utah has plenty of room for more doctors. Gonzalez said the Beehive State is in the top percentile as far as current opportunities for physicians, but that’s only because there aren’t enough of them.
“Utah ranked high mostly due to the small number of physicians … less than two per 1,000 residents,” Gonzalez said.
While they are higher on the food chain than nurses and other medical staff, another analyst who was part of the study said doctors have also been facing increasing pressure since the start of the pandemic in 2020.
“The greatest issue facing doctors today is their loss of professionalism due to the pressures placed on them by their employers like hospitals or practice owners,” Maxwell Mehlman, co-director of the Law-Medicine Center at Cleveland, Ohio’s Case Western Reserve University, said via an email statement. “These pressures preclude them from advocating for their patient’s welfare due to lack of time and concerns about annoying their employers/practice owners.”
The starting pay for doctors in Utah also has room for growth according to WalletHub statistics. The average starting monthly salary for doctors in Utah is $4,005 per month or 44th among the 50 states. The statistics also show that Utah is last among the 50 states as far as the percentage of the elderly population, despite the large elderly population in Southern Utah.
Where Utah ranks first among all the states is for the percentage of residents with health insurance from their employers (57.30%), laws catering to interstate licensure, the quality of the public hospital system (80.2%), presence of nationally accredited health departments. It also ranks third for hospitals given an “A” rating for safety (51.9%).
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