> Sometimes work inpatient all day sometimes clinic thrown in, but usually not done working until 7 PM, without even a 15 min break or a chance to eat a meal (15 hour day)
Honestly, that makes me agree with the parent comment that the medical profession must be getting stupider to not let a doctor take a break or eat a meal on a 15 hour day.
No, it's so the administrative staff can become further bloated as parasites upon the host of the actually productive doctors, and so the shareholders can take whatever breadcrumbs the administrative staff leaves behind.
Doctor pay-per-hour-worked varies a lot by specialty. My wife gets $270k/yr on her current contract after max bonuses and paying for malpractice insurance. That comes out to about $60/hr. this is in a mid col city in the USA.
That’s in no way bad money, but per hour worked PAs and many nurses make more than that. When I worked IT support I was paid close to that. It doesn’t at all seem worth the pain.
AMA membership by physicians have dropped from 75% in the 1950's to about 15% a few years ago. Doctors are actually not that great at advocacy which is the main reason why counter-AMA organizations don't exist imo.
A large chunk of their membership is just medical students and residents but thats primarily because they offer good savings to them like study materials.
Which lobbying organization is that? If you're referring to the AMA then you're wrong. They have actually been lobbying Congress to increase the number of physicians by funding more residency slots.
but to your point, studies have shown that handoffs kill patients. if you've got 18 people on a floor, each shift you hand off to has a statistically significant chance of screwing up one of them. So if there are 3 shift changes a day there are potentially 3 might-screw-you-up-bad rolls of the dice.
putting people on 12- or 24-hour sifts is crazy, but the sleep deprivation kills less than the shift change mistakes.
There are definitely capitalistic hospital business incentives at play here, but there is more than just that. Medicine is a notoriously supply-side gated field, and intentionally so by all practitioners. It’s one of the main drivers of the sky high pay white coats get access to after all the hoop jumping.
Speaking for the US, as it has a notorious track record for inefficiencies in its medicinal industry: the USA is getting older (aging population needing more care) with the cost of medical school higher than ever. With this, the production of doctors is unlikely to increase at a pace necessary to maintain levels of care uniformly across the board (for example, rural vs city medicine capabilities vary massively based on region).
Most hospitals attempt to use technology to squeeze more out of their doctors, as getting more doctors isn’t cheap (because there aren’t enough of them). Hospitals can’t do much to solve the doctor production shortage - that involves legislative changes and the American Medical Association (lobbying arm).
The capitalistic effects will compound all of this - but not so much in what you may be describing. If we don’t resolve things, in the medium-term future years we can see a bifurcation in medicine as we see in criminal defense law - the wealthy will have great access to world class healthcare, paid at an extreme premium, and everyone else will be out of luck. (Some would say we are already here there or rapidly approaching this state).
Honestly, that makes me agree with the parent comment that the medical profession must be getting stupider to not let a doctor take a break or eat a meal on a 15 hour day.