[malandrew]

It’s not that we’re bad at training medical personnel. It’s that the AMA acts as a cartel to limit the number of physicians train to keep income high. We just need to allow more people into medical schools and make more residencies available.

[naveen99]

The number of hospitals and hospitals beds is also controlled by certificates of need.

[FireBeyond]

Certificates of Need were something _hospitals_ themselves lobbied for. It's a case of "this is awesome when it protects me, and an aberration when I'm on the losing end".

Certainly politicians enacted such things, but I'm not losing sleep over the hospitals. Only us mortals, stuck with the cost of the system.

[lsc]

Yeah, remove the limiter, and how long does it take to make a doctor? I mean, sure, some people are saying that this thing is still gonna be here in four years (I am not a medical person, but that's what some of them say. something about the type of virus this is that will make a vaccine difficult) so that might not be a bad idea, but... I think we probably need to be focusing on how we can increase medical capacity four weeks from now more than four years from now.

[jdc]

Hell, we'll make it so med students can get a proper night's sleep during their residencies while we're at it.

[lsc]

the disrespect for sleep the medical profession has is insane.

If someone is gonna be cutting on me, I want them to have a good night's rest. They tell me to sleep consistently and well quite often. seems like if it's good for me it would be good for them, too.

[8note]

it's a hazing ritual

if too many make it to be doctors, the pay won't be as good.

[vsareto]

We should cut about $50-100B out of the military budget and make it for training medical personnel without raising tuition because it doesn't matter if there's no population to defend or recruit from.

[tropo]

It's easy if we are willing to cut red tape and willing to prioritize people over pets. Veterinarians need almost no training to do the job. Test runs done for emergency preparation have proven that veterinarians do a better job than all medical professionals who aren't already specialized in respiratory care.

[thewelder]

>Test runs done for emergency preparation have proven that veterinarians do a better job than all medical professionals who aren't already specialized in respiratory care.

That's amazing.

[barry-cotter]

> Yeah, remove the limiter, and how long does it take to make a doctor?

Undergraduate entry medical degrees in Ireland are either five or six years with summers off and ample other holidays. Post graduate is four years like the US but pre-med doesn’t exist. You have to learn the necessary content yourself ahead of time and if you fail the exams that’s your problem. You can get in with a degree with no science content whatsoever as long as you have high enough grades in your Bachelor’s. I believe during WWII the US ran some schools at three semesters a year so people were done in two years, eight months. A newly graduated doctor then has residency, a year of 60-100 hour weeks of on the job training. If some of the generalist training was cut you might be able to get someone able to do routine medical care in their specialty, like a nurse practitioner in three years.

[MiroF]

We need to do whatever we can to increase capacity, and that involves breaking up the AMA cartel. This isn’t a two weeks and gone crisis, sorry.

[gvjddbnvdrbv]

Two weeks...

[vidarh]

The problem with this is that until we have better means to train people without exposing them to real situations, increasing the number without lowering the overall skill level is an incredibly hard problem.

[Gravityloss]

There's no shortage of people with ailments... A lot just go untreated or are queuing for a long time.

[vidarh]

No, but there is a sufficiently large number of problems that relatively few people suffer from that even with people specialising there are plenty of problems where getting people to a point where they are competent enough to participate in operations on real people, and then get them enough experience to be able to do it unsupervised is a challenge.

We can specialize more, but that has its own problems in terms of e.g. availability to deal with urgent cases. And ultimately we do not get away from the fact that giving enough people enough experience even with relatively rare situations is a big challenge.

Eventually we will be able to simulate the situations well enough, and this problem will go away, but it simply is not as simple as throwing more bodies at it.

[im3w1l]

Well there are about to be a lot of real situations.

[vidarh]

For one specific type of illness. But we do not need staff that knows how to handle only rare exceptions, and that is the problem.

[im3w1l]

Training people to respond to this one situation so that they can respond to this one situation is fine. After covid19 is resolved they wont be needed anyway.