What needs to be done is a dramatic shift of power away from doctors in the medical industry. Flooding of medical labor markets with mid-levels - nurses, PAs, RAs, PTs - and relaxing respective scope of practice laws. Physicians will fight to death against new competition, even if it means killing themselves with unreasonable working hours.
https://www.auntminnie.com/Forum/tm.aspx?m=581583
"Don’t teach your mid levels procedures... Ultimately, a mid level that can do procedures, even easy ones, are your competitors."
https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/10/25/doctors-sal...
Also, it's the 21st century - why do doctors (more specifically, hospitals) generally work 9-5 M-F? Viruses and bacteria don't take the weekends off. Not to mention when people need to see a specialist, they need to wait weeks or even months for an appointment. Why? It's absurd. With a larger supply of doctors and something like 7am-10pm daily hours, it would result in a massive net benefit to society.
What country do you live in? In the USA hospitals are open and staffed for emergencies 24/7/365. I’m a Radiology Technologist who works in an ER and Surgery- and I’ve never worked less than 48 hrs per week. I work 2300hrs-0700hrs. If you are talking about viruses and bacteria, that’s usually not an emergency issue and yes, you CAN wait until normal business hours (unless you’re septic)
If I have have an infected tear duct (in fact, I do) requiring a visit to an ENT specialist (for example), it's frankly absurd that the next appointment requires a 2-6 week wait. And then it also affects the work day because ENTs docs are only available 9-5.
Why aren't there two shifts of doctors: 7am - 3pm, and (as an example) 12pm-8pm? At least I work a computer-based job; what about a construction worker or other blue-collar worker who has to take an entire day off because they can't log in and continue work remotely (and if you know blue collar folks, this is the reason many will skip preventative care until they are critically ill)?
Your argument seems to be "well you won't lose the eye or go blind so it's fine" and that simply isn't how we should be viewing healthcare.
And just for posterity's sake, I've spent years at hospitals and medical device companies, my background is in biomedical engineering, and I'm not what you'd consider a layman in this area.
Well, I don't have any insider knowledge, but from a healthcare consumer perspective, it sure seems like doctors have gotten scarce and NPs are doing everything these days.
I don't know how the money flows in a group practice with one doctor and everybody else is not, but I'd be curious about how it works.
Hospitals are being privatised and private universities dominate medical education. Where’s the political pressure point?
More complex skills are not taught in basic training, but later in specializations.
Under stress and duress and lack of sleep, people learn less. Moreover, while soldiers do in fact have to work in difficult physical conditions in action, doctors don't.
And I am not even sure what death on itself has to do with it. Conditions of encountering it are incredibly different in both professions.
Try working in an inner city ER at night when it can often feel very similar to a war zone. Instead of sandbags and soldiers with rifles we’re surrounded by bulletproof glass and police officers.
Soldiers are not surrounded by bullet proof glass nor by police officers.
While not as bad, ML/NLP/CV/AI grad school is still pretty bad. Maybe 60-70% of what med students (more specifically, residents) go through.
Uhhhhh what? I'm in grad school right now. I feel... a lot better-off than any medical student or resident I've ever met, or even than my wife, who's a high-school science teacher (God help her!).