Doctors meet better unions in that country
Senior doctors in New Zealan have one of the most powerful unions in the country
Junior doctors are catching up
It is still a punishing career, but not like that.
The darker side of being a doctor (2017)
171–180 of 521 posts
Re: The darker side of being a doctor (2017)
#172It's side point, but I'm wondering, why does the blog post start with a link to a book? It looks like an interesting book, but I don't see the relationship. Has Substack started running advertising?
Re: The darker side of being a doctor (2017)
#173Doctors meet better unions in that country Senior doctors in New Zealan have one of the most powerful unions in the country Junior doctors are catching up It is still a punishing career, but not like that.
In many countries doctors' unions actually encourage this sort of stuff, by restricting the number of spots in medical degrees. Making sure there are as few juniors as possible, making their life more miserable than it needs to be - this sort of stuff.
Re: The darker side of being a doctor (2017)
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some wards with really sick people benefit from having longer shifts as you see the person progress and have fewer shift changes. Ie with 2 people doing 12 hr shifts is better than 3 people doing 8 hours shifts as the doctors and nurses see how a patient is doing and dont have to communicate to next shift. Something like ER where people come and go all day wouldn't benefit from this however.
I’d rather have three well-rested people and an additional shift change than two burned out, exhausted people. People who are exhausted make mistakes. Maybe it would be better to focus on improving internal communication.
So would I.
Re: The darker side of being a doctor (2017)
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
While it's true that there is a limit (really there is a limit to every university study), there is also a limit to the number of people who are qualified and interested. For instance, there are only about 20k people who score > 510 on the MCAT per year (the average matriculant has about a 512). And remember that includes US & Canada. While I know there are a lot of people rejected from medical school each year, some…
> there are only about 20k people who score > 510 on the MCAT per year The article clearly shows the skills necessary to work as a doctor are a lot wider than academic ability. One pleasure/pain of being a software developer is that there is less gatekeeping.
> The article clearly shows the skills necessary to work as a doctor are a lot wider than academic ability.
Where does the article show this?
Re: The darker side of being a doctor (2017)
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’d rather have three well-rested people and an additional shift change than two burned out, exhausted people. People who are exhausted make mistakes. Maybe it would be better to focus on improving internal communication.
Have you looked at the research regarding which of those two options leads to better patient outcomes?
Have you? I’d love to hear that answer.
Re: The darker side of being a doctor (2017)
#177[deleted]
Re: The darker side of being a doctor (2017)
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some wards with really sick people benefit from having longer shifts as you see the person progress and have fewer shift changes. Ie with 2 people doing 12 hr shifts is better than 3 people doing 8 hours shifts as the doctors and nurses see how a patient is doing and dont have to communicate to next shift. Something like ER where people come and go all day wouldn't benefit from this however.
Yes but you really don't want to be treated at the end of that 12-hour shift, quality of service drops down significantly, they are significantly more tired at that point. Doctors are just humans like rest of us, and those shifts are often brutal.
That’s what I am trying to say, sleep deprivation causes people to make mistakes.
Re: The darker side of being a doctor (2017)
#179"We hoped our machines would automate our work and make us free. Instead they turned us into automatas."
Re: The darker side of being a doctor (2017)
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
Qualifications should come at the end of your education, not at the start.
Educating doctors is really expensive. It would really suck to invest all that money in someone (or in yourself) just for them to fail a final test or whatever. For what it's worth, I do agree we should train more doctors, but I think it's a complicated problem.
> Educating doctors is really expensive. It would really suck to invest all that money in someone (or in yourself) just for them to fail a final test or whatever.
This happens already, today. There are dozens of reasonable questions you can raise based on this fact - but I don't think it's obvious that the failures at the end of training can majoritarily be identified by pre-training metrics.
Some countries allow any student to take the first two years of medical courses, and then impose restrictions on the following years. This seems a relatively fair system; you can imagine someone persevering over many years to attain the requisite knowledge - but this person would not have had the opportunity if there were a pre-medical school filter