So the solution is to get more doctors who can then unload the burden. If you look at the cap on medical school enrollment in the US, it’s very much an artificial supply restriction to keep wages high.
There must be short term pain - in 15 years you can have a lot more doctors, but we have to get them through school and residency first, and everyone already in the industry needs to work even harder to do that.
Demand for healthcare is super high and supply of doctors is low. And you're arguing _against_ increasing the supply? The status quo isn't a valid answer -- if doctors are already at the point of burnout, something has to be done to fix the long-term problem that has brought us to this point.
Interesting! I didn't know this ... however, getting an MD is necessary to make someone ready to be a practising physician. In Ireland we seem to be drastically undersupplied with doctors - I had a couple of years recently where I was in my local ER quite a lot, and there were typically 2 doctors on duty, covering a catchment area of half a million people. Training more MDs seems like an important first step in increasing the supply
Residency programs are hot bullshit, it's just more gatekeeping. There's no reason that a recent medical grad couldn't do the same shit they're having nurse practitioners do instead of doctors at 95% of all care facilities now. Currently we cram the entirety of someone's medical training in 5 really awful years, then call them "finished" and let them do whatever the fuck they want with limited oversight in a lot of cases. If other trades ran like that, the world would be literally falling apart.
Residences are crucial for actual clinical learning, it's more developmental than medical school which is a broad base for understanding physiology. Most doctors at teaching programs will tell you: even 3rd-year med students barely know a thing. Could they likely do the same tasks as first-year NPs who went straight from RN to NP school without any clinical experience? Yes, probably, but they almost certainly would have the same vulnerability NPs do: they don't have anywhere close to the same understanding of the physiology critical for decision-making outside of typical cases or considering interactions of different indicators.
That said, I do think there's probably more of a role for some graduating med students than we use now. I don't think they need a 3-year residency to enable them for many general practitioner duties particularly in rural settings where the patient load is less, the pay is likely less, but the cases are more homogenous.
