Family practice physicians see a wide range of patients, including the elderly, children and middle age adults. In fact, family physicians are licensed to see patients of any age and may in a single day treat a variety of conditions and patients, from an elderly man with diabetes to a young infant who is not feeding well. Most family physicians work in outpatient settings, usually a family practice clinic. Some family physicians, however, may also work inside a hospital taking care of hospitalized patients. Depending on the local practice customs of any given state a family practice physician may also work in an Emergency Room in the role of an emergency room physician. Family practice physicians also are trained to perform a variety of office-based procedures in an outpatient setting. Such procedures may include outpatient colonoscopy and minor surgical procedures such as skin biopsies. Due to the great breadth in the training of family physicians, there are many job opportunities available in a variety of settings.
Some family practice physicians may decide to work as a "locum tenens". This may require the family practice physician to temporarily move to another state to fill in for an urgent need for a family practice physician who perhaps retired. Because there is such a current shortage of family practice physicians in the United States, especially in rural and under-served areas, it is relatively easy for a family practice physician to decide to find an available family practice physician locum tenens position. The job outlook of family practice physicians is expected to be excellent in the future due to the chronic shortage of primary care physicians in the United States. Locum tenens jobs are becoming more popular among physicians, possibly because they may allow one to do a significant amount of travel if doing locum tenens jobs for a number of years. Usually a family physician will fill the locum tenens job until a permanent replacement can be found. However, the family physician filling a locum tenens jobs will gain a great understand of different settings for practicing medicine and may decide to apply for a full-time position with their current locum tenens employer or with an employer that they have had experience with in the past as a locum tenens.
Primary care physicians usually include family physicians, pediatricians, obstetricians, and general internal medicine physicians. As the current administration plans on expanding the availability of healthcare, and primary care service especially, to the 47 million people without healthcare insurance this will undoubtedly lead to an increase in the need for family physicians nationwide. Many patients use emergency rooms and urgent care centers for medical complaints that could be addressed in an outpatient setting in a clinic by a family practice physician. It is believed that increasing the number of practicing family practice physicians, and primary care physicians in general, will help to alleviate the burden on the nation's emergency rooms. Certainly, there is currently a great need for family practice physicians to work in rural areas or under-served areas where wait times may be many months to obtain a family practice physician for routine healthcare needs such as annual check-ups. Family practice locum tenens are often used to staff such hard to fill positions, however, sometimes at greater cost than finding a permanent replacement.