Are these really the people that should be required to work so much? Isn’t their job about handling life and death daily? Wouldn’t we want exactly these people to come fully rested to work every single day and be fully staffed?
I don’t know if there are jobs with similar stakes that are so carelessly staffed and disgustingly paid.
A combination of a few things.
First, the founder of modern medical teaching was a man who loved cocaine and created a fairly aggressive education program which fed into a profession without work-life balance. The profession hasn’t self-reformed while cases where skilled labor has massive overtime is generally more regulated.
Second, the cost of education is enormous. Medical training for a doctor costs north of half a million dollars, so there is a high cost to training an additional doctor. Because of that, it is more cost effective to add additional shifts to existing doctors and nurses.
Third, a lot of doctors have a god complex and don’t want to admit they are fallible people. Because of this, they resist a lot of best practices other industries; checklists for operations are a 21st century “medical technology”. There isn’t a push within the industry to study how people fail like there is in other industries.
on the third point the it was the anesthiesa professional group which made the push for the much more rigorous process that greatly improved outcomes. So there is some precedence for the profession realizing it needs to improve processes.
Yes, and it is important that those doctors advocated for better patient care and that the desire to develop procedures are somewhat there. However, the medical profession as a whole seems to be less focused on procedures than others.
i assume you meant the residency program, yea that is such an abusive program that should be revised decades ago. i wonder if the medical admissions remain constant to med school or it declined. i know some people try different ways to get into the MD industry in AMERICA, EITHER AS foreigner/immigrant MD, or go to a questionable foreign medical school, apparently its tougher if you come from a foreign country as an MD.