In Philippines their president wanted to remove the cap on doctors.
Existing practicing doctors went on strike, they didn't want more competition. Funnily, population sided with doctors, instead of president.
Existing practicing doctors went on strike, they didn't want more competition. Funnily, population sided with doctors, instead of president.
It isn't because of that alone. In PH and Korea, senior doctors are expected to oversee junior or trainee doctors. These senior doctors are already overloaded with both giving care and training junior doctors.
Adding more MDs won't change anything because the residency/training bottleneck still exists and there is no way to change that.
This is why my SO left Vietnam for the US - getting paid $1-2k a year to train 6 juniors and work 60 hour shifts providing care is hellish.
The same is happening in Korea as well, with senior doctors leaving for Japan and the US now.
How? You need a residency to actually learn how to do stuff.
Just getting an MD is not enough to make someone ready to be a practicing physician.
Graduating more MDs doesn't automatically create more specialists tomorrow.
This is medicine. That short term pain means more people die than would have before.
When specialists quit, who replaces them? You need to be trained - just book learning and shadowing during an MD is not enough.
> everyone already in the industry needs to work even harder to do that
Everyone in the industry is already working hard.
The average physician works around a 50 hour weeks but 25% work 61-80 hour weeks [0].
It's already teetering on the brink due to burnout.
[0] - https://www.ama-assn.org/practice-management/physician-healt...
That said, I do think there's probably more of a role for some graduating med students than we use now. I don't think they need a 3-year residency to enable them for many general practitioner duties particularly in rural settings where the patient load is less, the pay is likely less, but the cases are more homogenous.
Plus SO often implies OP was a citizen and then SO comes in on a priority VISA program. They do check to ensure you really are romantically involved. There are a number of poor who decide nearly any American is a better life than they could have at home and so will sign up for a blind marriage to anyone. A doctor likely has means to do some verification of a potential mate before committing, but if they find life bad enough back home they can have low standards. (from what I can tell it mostly works out for those doing this - some get abused, but most seem to have a good life)
Also, we are definitely missing a large part of the story. There are very few medical schools outside US that will qualify you to practice is the US. Getting recertified in the US is extremely difficult, especially from a developing country with much worse healthcare standards.
If 1 person trains 6, then in a few years you now have 7 trained doctors who could either train 42 more or, if given half the workload, could train 21 more.
If the training doctors are always oversubscribed then there's a deeper problem in the system that's creating this bottleneck.