[yokaze]

Sorry, that is bollocks. That is the story most people believe, and makes for a convenient story for those people actually to blame. Funnily, it is also the story most doctors themselves seem to chose to believe in.

First, those are not the only choices. There is also the the option of training and hiring more doctors. 2

Probably, there is also an option of making more efficient use of doctors time, but that one is more complicated.

Most of the work of doctors is not life-saving.

I think, you see a standard problem of pushing shit down or up. Government lowers budget, pushes quotas down, which gets pushed down further until it reaches the bottom rank and file, the doctors.

They have to "do more with less" (Not limited to public sector, see Boeing), and that works for a while, until it doesn't.

[impossiblefork]

I think having more physicians is the core thing.

The US stands out in having so few physicians per capita (per 1000 it's 3.6 in the US, here in Sweden it's 7.1, in Germany 4.5, Spain in 4.6). This has been discussed before here before, and I don't think it was controversial that a sensible solution was to simply have more physicians.

I think one major thing that the US is doing wrong with that which is not so well known is that the training starts rather late in life. Thus you get less out of the physicians you train. Here in Sweden a physician has a MSc in medicine and is ready to meet patients and be trained when he's 23, and I think this has the benefit that there's no need to overwork them.

By the time they're 30 they'll have all the experience the need without having been overworked, and not sleeping enough kills intelligence, memory, drive, all mental qualities one may have.

I think these two policies, ensuring that people graduate earlier-- removing the pre-med and having people start right away with a medicine program, and graduating in 5.5 years, that's the right approach.

Physicians would earn less, but they'd have substantially better lives. Being able to start younger also means success younger, and happier families.

[Turing_Machine]

This was in Australia (4.1).

[impossiblefork]

Ah, thank you.

[Rinzler89]

>They have to "do more with less" (Not limited to public sector, see Boeing), and that works for a while, until it doesn't.

Yes, which brings us back to the point I made about it being a numbers game. IF you start cutting back pilots sleep and planes' QA to boost profits, you'll reach the "it doesn't work" phase (planes dropping from the air killing everyone) much sooner and at a steeper rate than with overworked doctors where the decline is a lot slower and gradual hence why this issue gets ignored more easily by those in charge, because it's so slow that people keep getting used to this as the new normal.

IF a few Boeings fall from the sky, people might stop flying Boeings, but people won't stop going to the doctor just because some people get killed from malpractice (which is statistically more likely than dying in a plane crash).

[sangnoir]

It's easier for the public to recognize and be outraged about 237 dead airline passengers compared to 237 dead patients even if both are caused by overtired pilots or "providers" (I hate that word for it's vagueness).

[closewith]

> Most of the work of doctors is not life-saving.

Yes, but working out which parts are and aren't critical is the $64,000 question.

[yokaze]

I think, that is a bit besides the point I wanted to make.

Yes, it is very hard to know a priori, what is life-saving, and what not. No, I do not wanted to suggest that the work of doctors it is not important.

The common understanding of doctors (their self-understanding included) is, that their work is very important, to the point that they exploit themselves. Or allow themselves to be "exploited".

In this forum, more commonly you have people here working on productive systems, which can empathize with the feeling the responsibility for the operations and not wanting to drop the ball.

People with that mindset think, they may safe a patient / the system, but working oneself to exhaustion won't solve those problems. And on the contrary, the exhaustion may be a contributing factor of making things worse in various ways. One directly by your actions, the other indirectly by covering up systemic problems.

[Turing_Machine]

Indeed. Is that weird mole just a weird mole, or is it skin cancer?