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> Nazario says that while burnout is common among workers, for doctors, it can seem worse because all the schooling and training they’ve undergone can feel like
by mdmnk 8y ago
> Nazario says that while burnout is common among workers, for doctors, it can seem worse because all the schooling and training they’ve undergone can feel like a waste when most of their day is spent typing codes into their medical software.
> “It’s almost like being a cog in a wheel, where they’re going through the motions of what’s necessary, not necessarily using all the knowledge that she or he has gained in the years of training,” Nazario says.
Sounds a whole lot like software engineering. I am guessing that this is how many people with specialized skill sets feel once they've maintained a job utilizing that skill set for some length of time.
- jseliger 8y agoSoftware engineering has nothing like the licensing and education requirements medicine does. You do not have to spend seven post-grad years to become a software engineer, or take out four years of post-grad loans.
- eldavido 8y agoAnd yet, software (as an industry) mostly works. Something to consider.
- carbocation 8y agoThat's a different topic entirely, one that's worth discussing: would medicine still work without the system that we have? But the question that is being discussed here is not that question.
- sixstringtheory 8y agoWhat I’m seeing is that you’d be fine to let someone who got disillusioned with the career/salary prospects of holding a useless degree take a 2 month course on the Paleo diet, and then remove one of your kidneys.
- eldavido 8y agoHere's what would happen in reality: Doctors need insurance against medical malpractice and other forms of liability. So the insurance companies would develop their own form of standardization/credentialing, much like what happens in other industries like construction or shipping, to determine what are actually the highest risk factors for liability and other losses. You wouldn't be able to get insurance without following these guidelines. The advantage of this system is that it's not written into law, making it much, much easier for it to change and evolve over time. Insurers would compete for business by pushing up against the minimum allowable standards and innovation would occur. The thing I think people forget, is that legislated mandates are by their very nature, extremely hard to change. Regulations of the sort the FCC uses are easier, as they can be done by the agency itself, but they have their own problems. I just don't think it requires MD-level training to do everything we need doctors to do today. Nurse practitioners and other less-credentialed peers are already taking up a lot of workload in medical offices and costs are still exploding.
- jraines 8y agoit's worse in the sense of: imagine you are primarily evaluated on adherence to an unintuitive and complex style guide plus some dumb metric like "lines of code added", and your pay can be withheld temporarily or permanently (for a given year) if you don't meet your targets