#physician shortage

[pervysmirks]

If you are a woman or care about women’s health, this gives you a good idea of what life is like right now in Texas & other states that have banned abortion outright.

And, frankly, it’s FRIGHTENING.

[topaz-eyes]

All doctors need to become salaried employees, period. None of this fee-for-service or "enrolled"-type exclusivity--it simply does not work. Patients cannot always wait weeks or months for care. They should not be penalized if their doctor cannot see them in a timely manner and they must go elsewhere.

Dozens of Ontarians are expressing frustration in the province’s health-care system after their family doctors either dropped them as patients or threatened to after they sought urgent care elsewhere.

Nearly 100 people contacted CTV News Toronto over several days in response to a callout for personal experiences(opens in a new tab) with the process known as “de-rostering.”

Many said that they had no idea that they could be dropped as patients and only found out about it after they visited another clinic for care.

Ottawa resident Ashley Desrochers said that in mid-January she made the decision to visit an after-hours clinic for urgent care after her legs started to severely swell. Her family doctor agreed to see her, she said, but had no availabilities for about two months.

She decided to go to a walk-in facility associated with her primary care provider, and while there she saw her own family doctor – who promptly gave her an appointment a few days later. [...]

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

[alveolaraspergillosis]

guys who wants to help me prepare for medical school interviews apparently this is how they're evaluating me

[thetrainingnetwork]

Do you think we can do that? 

"‘Ugly’ sums it up. A Physician Associate's story exposes toxic NHS culture, workplace bullying, and systemic issues. Can we balance innovation with civility in healthcare? #NHSCrisis #HealthcareReform"

Ugly… that’s the first word that came into my mind. A story on the BBC news website. A bio-tale about a woman called Julia, working in the NHS, as a physician’s associate. It tells of her joy at starting her work and how it’s since become toxic, as she is ostracised in the workplace by doctors.  Not because of who she is, or how she behaves but because of what she is. How it’s perceived she…

[minnesotafollower]

Minnesota Experiencing Increasing Shortages of Physicians and Nurses

This blog previously noted that the U.S. existing population of physicians is aging and reaching retirement and therefore needing replacement and hence the need to recruit  physicians licensed in other countries.[1] Not surprisingly the State of Minnesota is experiencing the same problem for physicians and nurses.[2] “Aging is taking its toll on the [State’s] doctor ranks, causing the vacancy…

[thetaylor829fdninc]

Doctor shortages are here — and they’ll get worse if we don’t act fast

There are a number of reasons for the projected physician shortage and a number of solutions to the problem have been identified—and they all have one thing in common: the need to get started right away.

[reasonsforhope]

"When Ellen Kaphamtengo felt a sharp pain in her lower abdomen, she thought she might be in labour. It was the ninth month of her first pregnancy and she wasn’t taking any chances. With the help of her mother, the 18-year-old climbed on to a motorcycle taxi and rushed to a hospital in Malawi’s capital, Lilongwe, a 20-minute ride away.

At the Area 25 health centre, they told her it was a false alarm and took her to the maternity ward. But things escalated quickly when a routine ultrasound revealed that her baby was much smaller than expected for her pregnancy stage, which can cause asphyxia – a condition that limits blood flow and oxygen to the baby.

In Malawi, about 19 out of 1,000 babies die during delivery or in the first month of life. Birth asphyxia is a leading cause of neonatal mortality in the country, and can mean newborns suffering brain damage, with long-term effects including developmental delays and cerebral palsy.

Doctors reclassified Kaphamtengo, who had been anticipating a normal delivery, as a high-risk patient. Using AI-enabled foetal monitoring software, further testing found that the baby’s heart rate was dropping. A stress test showed that the baby would not survive labour.

The hospital’s head of maternal care, Chikondi Chiweza, knew she had less than 30 minutes to deliver Kaphamtengo’s baby by caesarean section. Having delivered thousands of babies at some of the busiest public hospitals in the city, she was familiar with how quickly a baby’s odds of survival can change during labour.

Chiweza, who delivered Kaphamtengo’s baby in good health, says the foetal monitoring programme has been a gamechanger for deliveries at the hospital.

“[In Kaphamtengo’s case], we would have only discovered what we did either later on, or with the baby as a stillbirth,” she says.

The software, donated by the childbirth safety technology company PeriGen through a partnership with Malawi’s health ministry and Texas children’s hospital, tracks the baby’s vital signs during labour, giving clinicians early warning of any abnormalities. Since they began using it three years ago, the number of stillbirths and neonatal deaths at the centre has fallen by 82%. It is the only hospital in the country using the technology.

“The time around delivery is the most dangerous for mother and baby,” says Jeffrey Wilkinson, an obstetrician with Texas children’s hospital, who is leading the programme. “You can prevent most deaths by making sure the baby is safe during the delivery process.”

The AI monitoring system needs less time, equipment and fewer skilled staff than traditional foetal monitoring methods, which is critical in hospitals in low-income countries such as Malawi, which face severe shortages of health workers. Regular foetal observation often relies on doctors performing periodic checks, meaning that critical information can be missed during intervals, while AI-supported programs do continuous, real-time monitoring. Traditional checks also require physicians to interpret raw data from various devices, which can be time consuming and subject to error.

Area 25’s maternity ward handles about 8,000 deliveries a year with a team of around 80 midwives and doctors. While only about 10% are trained to perform traditional electronic monitoring, most can use the AI software to detect anomalies, so doctors are aware of any riskier or more complex births. Hospital staff also say that using AI has standardised important aspects of maternity care at the clinic, such as interpretations on foetal wellbeing and decisions on when to intervene.

Kaphamtengo, who is excited to be a new mother, believes the doctor’s interventions may have saved her baby’s life. “They were able to discover that my baby was distressed early enough to act,” she says, holding her son, Justice.

Doctors at the hospital hope to see the technology introduced in other hospitals in Malawi, and across Africa.

“AI technology is being used in many fields, and saving babies’ lives should not be an exception,” says Chiweza. “It can really bridge the gap in the quality of care that underserved populations can access.”"

-via The Guardian, December 6, 2024

[newsbites]

The North Island’s health-care crisis continues...

[gatheringbones]

[“To understand the shortage of beds, it helps to think of just-in-time delivery. Companies like to have just enough space for what they need, work with, and sell, not more and not less. For a hospital, the human body is the object that is to be delivered, altered, and shipped away just in time. There should never be too many bodies, or too few bodies. There should be just the right number of bodies on just the right number of beds.

Good doctors, good nurses, and good assistants resist this logic all the time, but they are pushing a boulder up a mountain. Maintaining beds costs money. No hospital, in American commercial medicine, is going to maintain a reserve of beds when other hospitals do not do so. Since financial logic dominates medical logic, the country must always be unprepared for epidemics. There can never be a reserve of beds, nor for that matter a reserve of protective equipment or ventilators. Managers counting on a quarterly profit cannot factor in pandemics, which arrive about once a decade. Each time a plague comes, the situation will be defined as exceptional, and the shortages will make the emergency even worse than it had to be. Then money will fly around: not to where the doctors might want, since they will not be asked, but to the sectors of the economy with the loudest voices. This just happened, and with commercial medicine it will keep happening.

In the hospital, sad to say, a body is a widget. Kindly assistants, competent nurses, and decent physicians try to humanize the widget, but they are constrained by a system. A body creates revenue if the body is the right kind of sick for the right length of time. Certain kinds of illnesses, especially ones treatable (or reputed to be treatable) with surgery and drugs, make money. No one has an economic incentive to keep you healthy, to get you well, or for that matter to keep you alive. Health and life are human values, not financial ones; an unregulated market in the treatment of our bodies generates profitable sickness rather than human thriving.”]

timothy snyder, from our malady: lessons in liberty from a hospital diary, 2020

[morlock-holmes]

We are now, what, two three years into the Adderall shortage, and I have been informed by my pharmacy that their next order will arrive during a weekday in November.

Yes, that is how specific the information is.

The amount they will get in November will almost certainly not fill all extant prescriptions, so it will be distributed to whoever calls in and asks for the prescription to be filled on that day.

There is no automated method for informing customers whether the pharmacy has received a shipment, you must call and speak to a pharmacy representative.

This is a very small version of what I assume it must have been like to live in the Soviet Union: Every single decision maker insisting that they are actually operating at 110% efficiency and there are no further improvements that could be made, while meanwhile shortages drag on for literal years and everything grinds to a halt in a bureaucratic mire.

Like, the fact that the way to fix this is to literally call the pharmacy every day and talk to a person means that all of the pharmacists are wasting a tremendous amount of time for, and I cannot stress this enough, literally no reason whatsoever except sheer laziness and apathy on the part of Albertsons management.

In other news, you may remember that after calling four different "Health Homes" that my insurance accepts as PCPs, I got an appointment for 9:40 AM on Christmas Eve. Luckily, they have a telehealth program called "Bridges" which allows you to speak to an RN to get basic health care while you are waiting out the effects of the national Physician shortage that all of our politicians are pretending doesn't exist for some reason.

As best as I can tell, my insurance rejected the claim from the bridges team because they want me to use my Health Home. The one I don't have because they don't have any openings. The one that the bridges team is supposed to cover for until you get establishing care.

I wonder if the people who do health insurance claims ever wonder how many suicides they've caused when they go to bed at night.

[loving-n0t-heyting]

Im reading about the doctors strike in SK and my impression is that its proooooobably bullshit? So the obvious prima facie case against the strike is that a) SK has a doctor per capita rate just underneath the US, whose cartel-imposed doctor shortage i have had to experience firsthand and ii) the strike is in response to the govt mandating larger incoming med student classes to correct for this shortage. Looking pretty bad! Youd better have some serious defeaters for these reasons for me to take you seriously, korean medical union!

And the excuses offered are, uh, not great. Not great as either rebutters or undercutters. The rationales for the strike include complaints like underpaying wages and fear that an influx of new students will exacerbate a concentration of doctors in low priority fields and urban areas. The second complaint here just seems obviously specious: you can add as many new doctors to the cities or dermatology as you please and it wont delete the inevitable new rural surgeons. As for pay... salaryexpert tells me the average south korean doctors base salary is ~127M₩, glassdoor gives an estimated salary for physicians of ~70M₩. Both within the upper ventile or so of sk worker income (the salaryexpert estimate is in the fucking sk stratosphere). A korea herald article from last june confirms that these incomes are exceptionally high among oecd countries

The striking doctors also assure us the public is served just fine by the current low per capita rate of doctors, a claim with which 84% of south koreans disagree

So yea im calling bullshit. Sorry to be a tool of a reactionary govt and a scourge to labour but physician cartels are past the limit of my solidarity

[scientia-rex]

Hey, I just wanted to tell you that I have massive amounts of respect for the work you do, and that you and all medical professionals deserve a hug and a pat on the back and systemic change and reform that allows you to have a healthy work-life balance without being forced to make the choice to compromise patient care or meet your basic needs.

Call your local elected representatives and tell them you want more residency spots that are federally funded so we can train more doctors so we have fewer provider shortages. International medical graduates who WOULD come here to work are being kept out by racism while we know we don't even have enough training slots for everyone who would like to work here. Also, we need lower medical school tuition; this would also allow the salaries for physicians to be lower and would decrease pressure to be in specialties and cities, when the worst shortages tend to be rural primary care. Call your elected reps, pick one thing, say it clearly, tell them you live in their district (and don't lie), and then keep doing that on a regular basis forever.

Also tell them we really, really need reform because United Health Care being allowed to own every step of the healthcare world and profit off of all of it has meant significant decreases in quality of patient care. Vertical integration IS monopoly, and they're killing people every day.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

https://bc.ctvnews.ca/b-c-mayor-gets-calls-from-across-canada-about-crazy-plan-to-recruit-doctors-1.7154879

[contentloadingandstuff]

Lisa, Kujou Sara and Ningguang caring for a sick S/O

A/N: Just some short and silly headcanons since I'm a little ill. The characters were picked by The Wheel. Don't ask why ALF is on the cover.

Lisa

"Don't worry, sweetie. Mommy Lisa will take very good care of you~" 

Enough said, Lisa is an expert at potion crafting. As soon as she notices you're sick, you'll have one of her most effective tinctures delivered to you in no time. It's bitter, but it will help - you'll be frolicking again in just a few days. If it helps, she'll be more than happy to spoon feed it to you! 

Nothing helps the body quite like a rich broth. Add some chicken, boil with carrots and top it off with some fresh marjoram straight from the windowsill, and viola - just like that you have yourself a tasty revitalizing soup. Lisa doesn't like eating meat, but she knows how important proteins are for recovery. 

Tending to you is a great opportunity to pamper the absolute life out of you. Tissues and medicine? Right on the spot. Feeling peckish? Here, let her feed you. Thirsty? The best tea will be brought directly to you. Sleepy? Lisa will tuck you in, or let you rest your head on her thighs if you want to. You will have everything you need and even more without having to move an inch. 

Lying in bed is important - it lets your body sleep and regain strength. Still, boredom strikes sometimes. Lisa will provide you with a few books from her personal collection. If you're too tired to read yourself, she will do it out loud. Her narration skills are really something special, and will keep you entertained for hours on end, or until you doze off in her caring arms. 

Kujou Sara

“The medic will be here shortly. Do you need tea or a cold compress?”

Although Sara isn’t well-known for her caring nature, she really does worry about you. Inazuma’s climate tends to be quite harsh, with all the frigid sea winds blowing through the islands day by day. Even a minor ailment can quickly turn into a long-term illness in these conditions, so she will convince you to stay home when the first symptoms appear.

If you work in the military, your leave will be signed by her without further issues. If you’re working in the civilian market, however, she won’t restrain from using her position to ensure your leave is approved by your boss. Because who in their right mind would argue with the Tengu General herself?

It has been some time since the conclusion of the Inazuman civil war, so most work regarding that period is far behind her. Sara’s general duties revolve mainly around paperwork - reading through inventory reports, approving funding requests and purchases as well as some officer training meetings every now and then. Thanks to that fact, she can work from home and keep an eye on you.

Sara isn’t the best of cooks, so most meals will be handled by your maids. This doesn’t mean she won’t contribute to your recovery. She will check up on you frequently, whether to see if you’re taking your medicine correctly, or just to keep you company.

Of course she will call a physician to examine you, and buy all the necessary medicine - she has an immense pile of money saved up due to her fairly modest lifestyle. 

One thing though - she’s sleeping on the couch. Sara can’t afford to get ill herself, even if it means forcing you to recover in a cold bed. Don’t you worry, she will give you more than enough affection to make up for that shortage once you’re back in full health. 

Ningguang

“Don’t worry, my dear. You will get better soon. Meanwhile, why don’t you try another cup of tea? I am sure it will help.”

Ningguang is a busy woman who has no time for sickness. But you? She’ll make sure you get the proper rest, else your weakened body will fall to another illness. There will be no work for you until you are fully recovered - just like Sara, Ningguang will not hesitate to pull a few strings to make sure you can rest without worry.

Baizhu will deliver only his best products, as money is hardly a concern for Ningguang. Every Mora used to help you get better is a Mora well-spent in her eyes. 

Although not a doctor by any means, Ningguang will use some homemade remedies as well - especially white tea with two spoonfuls of honey. The warm sugary drink will surely bring back your strength in no time… or at least lift your spirits. 

She will check up on you from time to time, yes, but will not take a day off. Liyue needs her, and there’s always money to be made. 

Ningguang will make sure to keep her distance - even if it is just a cold, it could affect her as well and make her work that much more annoying. That means no cuddles until you’re healthy - but, with the best medicine money can buy, you’ll be in her arms in no time.

Thanks for reading!

[autisticadvocacy]

"Stulberg and others worry that this self-selection away from states with abortion restrictions will exacerbate the shortages of physicians in rural and underserved areas."

[seriouslysam8]

I have to say -- I keep getting your fics confused with canon. Your Demelza has cemented itself as my official version. I found myself just accepting Marlene and Teegan from Brumons/Selcouth as canon too. I do miss Hermione in your fics, but I get your aversion after reading some of your explanations. I think writers spend too much time making her this all-knowing "go away for a chapter to research and then comes back with all the answers and piercing insight" type of character who can make no mistakes. But I have a bit more fondness for her so I notice her absence more.

I miss Brumous but I could 100% see where you were beginning to struggle/flame out with it. I'd noticed inthe last few chapters there was a lot less Harry/Ginny conversational time, which is where I think your writing really shines the most. You've got a great grasp of their voices.

Plus once you get to a certain point in plot deviation fics it becomes way too easy to just try and match everything into the official storyline and then it's more like...why even bother writing it? So instead you have to cut and adjust the canon into the new universe which can feel more like work than just exploring the relationship interactions JKR never really gave us.

It's my favorite part of Selcouth, too. So I'm really looking forward to that next chapter. I've got a lot of empathy for Harry's career choice there, dealing with stuck-in-their ways medical professionals is the worst, especially as a new physician.

I’m glad that my fics get you confused with canon! I’ve put so much love and effort into some of these OCs or more developed canon characters. I always keep them pretty consistent throughout all my different universes so they all read cohesively!

The Hermione missing just puzzles me all around. There are plenty of fics that drop other characters from their plot lines. But everyone seems to be hung up on Hermione in my fics. I wish other characters could receive as much love as her. There are tons of characters who deserve just as much or move love than her.

The Brumous burnout really wasn’t because of any frustrations with the plot or not knowing what to write. I’m perfectly comfortable with not matching with canon or worried that my writing chops aren’t up to snuff to divert dramatically from the source material. Not to sound conceded, but I do think I have the ability to tell unique stories and the ability to stray away from the stations of canon with no shortage of creativity. The main issue is, I think, boredom. While writing the longer stories in MIT, I was able to maintain writing one-shots and short stories within that universe to keep my interest from falling behind. With this, I can’t jump around in the timeline without spoiling everything I have planned. So, then, I think of totally different ideas that draw me in and those stories are never short and sweet. My attention keeps getting pulled more and more. I’m at the point now where I need to completely reread Brumous to continue and get back into the groove. That’s a task daunting with and within itself. Couple with the overwhelming response I’ve gained from Selcouth… damn, it’s hard to get back into the teenage Hinny mindset.