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Wednesday, March 05, 2008
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About Me: I'm a 23-year-old who just finished his second year at a Canadian medical school, blogging about the funny, action-packed, and dramatic moments of my medical education. View profile... The start of VM...
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- First Post
- First time doing CPR
- First breast exam
- Top 10: Things I learned on House
- Top 10: Med Application gimmicks
- Comparison: Jail vs. Med School
- Making a grown man cry
- Series: Top 10 lists
- Series: Pharmaceutical industry
- Series: Interdisciplinarity
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- Addicted to Medblogs
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- Counting Sheep
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- Just Keep Breathing
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- Musings of a Dinosaur
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- On Doctoring
- Over My Med Body!
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*Finus Printicus
6 readers cool enough to comment:
Once I went to my doctor's to have stiches and then later removed. She told me that I could have just done it myself.
I felt really bad- like I was wasting her time or something.
So yes, we do need more doctors!!
have them removed*
Sorry. I normally do have good grammar.
The CMA is lobbying for a fund to "enhance the lives of healthcare providers"? Talk about self-serving.
Healthcare providers aren't exactly disadvantaged members of society here.
You say self-serving like it's a bad thing (I can tell from your tone of voice :) ). The CMA is a professional association. Professional associations exist in great part to increase the quality of the lives of their members - I'm happy to see the CMA is indeed fulfilling this objective.
However, the CMA is one of those rare professional associations that also looks to improve the lives of others, especially patients (ie. every Canadian). And by increasing the quality of lives of its members, the CMA is doing just that.
How? Well, first of all, I'd agree that physicians (but not all health care providers) are not financially disadvantaged...once they have been working for several years. But when you take into consideration work hours, benefits (none, for most family doctors), stress levels, workload, personal time, lack of resources, overhead, amount of responsibility, and government bureaucracy, they are indeed at a disadvantage compared to many other professions.
If you want to include all health-care workers, just ask any nurse who wants to work full-time, but has to work 3 part-time jobs instead (with no benefits) because no full-time positions are available, or who has to work night shifts until her seniority is in the millenia range.
Or ask a resident facing an average debt of $158,000.
That being said, while the CMA is indeed serving its physician members, a happy doctor makes for a happier patient.
Think of it this way. You are driving and are hit by a drunk driver, and taken to the nearest trauma centre. The first person who looks you over is likely a medical resident. Do you think they will provide you with better care if they are completely unstressed? Or would you prefer them to feel burdened by the stress of a massive debt that they can't afford to pay back (which is the case for many residents), overwork, little free time, and have all those things on their mind when they are treating your injuries?
I'd argue that by enhancing the lives of their members, the CMA is indeed self-serving...but that's a good thing, because ultimately, that will benefit the Canadian public.
First, let's agree that there are many structural issues at work in our healthcare system that the CMA has rightly identified as objects of criticism. The bureaucratic and regulative failings (i.e. the nurse with 3 part-time jobs, the poor scheduling of debt repayments for residents), however, aren't at issue here since I object solely to the CMA lobbying for a fund to improve the quality of life of healthcare professionals.
Clearly the CMA is indeed a professional association, but it's not "just" a professional association. It's a self-regulative body that's entrusted with a great deal of responsibility that would otherwise be taken up by a government institution. Further, it claims to represent the interests of patients. To lobby for self-serving ends is a betrayal of the trust that Canadians [rightly and necessarily] place in the medial community.
Now, it certainly seems plausible that enhancing the lives of CMA members will benefit the public, but the question is whether using government funds to do so would benefit the public more than any other use of those funds would. Public spending is all about tradeoffs. It's not enough to simply be worthy -- every program is funded at the expense of another worthy program. There's been no case made here as to why improving the quality of life for healthcare professionals should be prioritized over education, social programs, other medical funding, etc.
Finally, if it's indeed demonstrated that the most efficient use of public funds would in fact be such a healthcare providers fund, why should the public's concern be enhancing their "quality of life"? The chief concern is, in fact, the quality of care. If, for example, instead of enhancing the stressed resident's quality of life, we could achieve the same total efficiency improvement at half the cost by sending him to therapy, it seems only right to do so and invest the cost savings where needed elsewhere to improve the quality of life of people ever so much more in need of it than medical professionals.
"If, for example, instead of enhancing the stressed resident's quality of life, we could achieve the same total efficiency improvement at half the cost by sending him to therapy..."
Preventative medicine usually costs less and is much more effective than treating the ensuing problems. Should it even be ethically permissible to allow a condition to progress to the point of needing treatment, when it can be prevented in the first place?
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