We Still Don’t Care About Doctors

Coach is Right ^ | 12/23/15 | Michael D. Shaw

[Oldpuppymax]

In April, 2010, I posted a story pointing out a curious paradox. Inasmuch as healthcare—Obamacare—was such a hot topic, no one seemed to care about how poorly physicians were being treated by the system. Indeed, for all of its billions in spending, Obamacare does almost nothing to improve the lot of doctors, even as its rollout underscores the problems they face. Nor does it do much to alleviate their shortage.

It is hardly a revelation that government bureaucrats are the enemies of practicing physicians. Heck, this goes back 50 years to Medicare. But it is only recently that academic medicine, and its supporting cast of fat-cat NGOs, are also openly piling on.

I refer to the iCOMPARE and FIRST clinical trials, which are intended to test whether excessively long work-hour schedules for medical residents at hospitals across the U.S. cause more death and injuries to patients. Your first clue that these trials might be questionable is their hackneyed use of twee acronyms. Here’s the decode: Individualized Comparative Effectiveness of Models Optimizing Patient Safety and Resident Education; Flexibility in Duty Hour Requirements for Surgical Trainees.

Notably, both of these trials allow first-year residents to work shifts lasting 28 consecutive hours or more—nearly twice the current maximum number of hours allowed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME). And this with the full approval of ACGME. At first blush, this seems surprising, since just four years ago, ACGME published its Duty Hour Standard Enhancing Quality of Care, Supervision and Resident Professional Development. Among other things, based on available research, it limited shifts for first year residents (PGY-1) to 16 hours.

Yet now, ACGME, one of dozens of parasitic NGOs sucking the very lifeblood out of healthcare, provided seed funding and agreed to waive its own requirements...

[buckalfa]

I find some value in an educational training system that is geared to weeding out the incompetent through a system of abuse. Do you want a physician treating you that has not proved his or her mettle in the trenches? Resident programs do need to be expanded to facilitate the physician demand that an aging population presents. Those programs do not however need to be watered down to accommodate political correctness.

[HonkyTonkMan]

We don’t care about blog pimps and people who post and run

[Fido969]

Cry me a river. Docs are making out like bandits.

[dangerdoc]

I survived old school residency training.

What I didn’t survive was years of decreasing compensation and increasing regulations and the uncompensated time requirements of the transition to digital medical records.