Your weekend cover story of the growing problem of a primary care shortage in Maine began to scratch the surface of what we are all facing. Thank you for shining a light on this crisis.

I am a family physician who has practiced primary care in Central Maine for eight years, and I am increasingly concerned about the magnitude of this problem. The general public needs to understand what we are facing.

Our clinics are dangerously under-resourced, under-funded, and under-staffed, and the current fee-for-service model of our healthcare system does not value primary care the way it needs to be valued for our communities to be healthy. We are facing rates of burnout that are unsustainable, and fewer and fewer of our trainees are choosing to go into primary care.

Advance practice providers such as physician assistants and nurse practitioners are important members of the team approach to this problem, but they face the same pressures and incentives that physicians face, and are increasingly choosing to go into specialty care.

What can we do? People can contact their legislators about the importance of primary care, and of increasing its funding significantly, while changing our models of payment to better support primary care teams. We also need to increase public support and funding of public health, so that we can raise the baseline of health of our entire communities.

Legislators should listen to their constituents who are physicians working in the trenches of primary care. This affects us all.

Marya Goettsche Spurling, New Sharon