Hacker News Reader

Comment by galahad_ | Hacker News Reader

Because you can't just set a higher number of students per year, for more students you have to create more facilities first. It's not like IT, where you can learn everything pretty well basically just with a study program, books and online lectures. As a medical student you have to do a lot of practical stuff with things that you don't get at home.

View on HN

Facilities can be built. Training programs can be expanded. Those are reasons why programs can't be doubled this year, but inside of a few years it's all possible. This problem has been cooking for decades.

What actually happened was cartel shit.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1997/03/09/r...

I agree with this - in the US we have nurses picking up doctor roles (e.g. anesthesia), hours-worked caps, PAs (physician assistants) also picking up doctor roles, tons of international physicians coming for underserved specialities (family medicine, pediatrics, psych, etc).

And of course, residents super overworked. I think it speaks for itself that making medicine 2x - 3x more people per year would help the problem. Yes, there's a "sweet spot" where quality of doctors would drop, but there's also a sweet spot where services rendered drop due to overwork, and we're on the far side of that one

Yep, and it'll get worse before it gets better. The boomer wave will (continue to) hit faster than we can grow the system. The best time to fix it was a decade ago when everyone saw it coming, but the second best time is now.

“…doctor roles (e.g. anesthesia)…” Anesthesia has primarily been a nursing role, and it’s been this way since the American civil war. Physicians didn’t really want any part of it early on as it wasn’t very prestigious or lucrative. Nurse anesthetists have historically provided and continue to provide the vast majority of anesthetics, in the US at least.

it's a monopoly end of story

in portugal, public workers are one of the biggest lobbies

medicine

- can't be taught at (non public) private universities

- there's limited growth in class sizes/etc

- it's nearly impossible to get into due to grade inflation at high school, which means only the richer paying for private high school pass it (requires grade 19.x/20 at least)

At the same time, there's 100s of nursing schools (can't be too different can it?), there's way too many nurses and way too few doctors.

We're importing doctors from cuba and other countries to fill the gap.

Some people decide to study abroad (within EU) because yay, you study medicine in eastern europe, you may come back to work in Portugal because EU, and again only the richer people could afford this

That would be the university's decision, then, not a state-mandated cap.

I have asked my doctor friend about this and it's because university courses are tied to actual hospital placements and training, there's really a limited amount of students that can properly train to be doctors because they do half of it on a ward. That's the reason there's such an expansion now of Physicians Assistants, which are like doctors but missing half the training.

In the UK, many highly rated Universities would love to be allowed to take more medical students, and expand their facilities.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com