ROCHESTER, N.Y. – Our emergency rooms and nursing homes are overcrowded and there aren’t enough nurses and primary care doctors to sustain our aging population.  They are issues News10NBC’s investigative team has been looking into for years but a group of local doctors want to make some systemic changes they hope might help but the first step is hearing directly from patients.

Dr. Mary Coan has been a local doctor for decades. “I’m board certified in both integrative medicine and family medicine,” she says. As the years have passed, “it gets harder every single day and I think we’ve definitely come to a health care crisis and I think it’s beyond the individual patient, the individual physician… it’s a whole community crisis,” Dr. Coan says.

It starts in primary care. It’s an uphill task for anyone to find or change doctors. “I have a waiting list which most people do,” Dr. Coan says. Even once you get in, “the biggest thing is access to care and if I send them to a specialist, they don’t get to see the specialist. They’re seeing a nurse practitioner or a mid-level,” she explains.

Dr. Michael Privitera is a local psychiatrist. “I never used to think about retiring but it was the system that made me say, I can’t do this anymore,” he tells News10NBC.  He now works with the Monroe County Medical Society and the Patient-Clinician Alliance to try and help both doctors and patients navigate a broken health care system.

“A lot of times in health care it’s executives talking to executives so, we need those people either on the front lines or experiencing the health issues to get their issues brought up (the chain)” Dr. Privitera says.

That’s why he and Dr. Coan want to hear from all of us. The Patient-Clinician Alliance has put together a survey to get a feel for the biggest challenges patients are facing. “This is our community, we want our patients health to be better and how can we do this by working together so patients and clinicians working together how can we amplify those voices,” Dr. Privitera says. “You hear a lot of complaints about doctors being burnt out, we’re really not the important ones here, we need the important ones to speak up,” Dr. Coan added.

If you want to speak up and share your experience in an effort to help the system overall, you can take the survey. It shouldn’t take any longer than 15 minutes and the data gathered will be brought to the people who create health care policy and make insurance decisions. The Patient-Clinician Alliance is hoping to get more than a thousand participants.

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