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I don’t think you can reasonably draw a comparison from medicine to home electrics and plumbing. My dad was a plumber and I’m preparing to pass the certificati

I don’t think you can reasonably draw a comparison from medicine to home electrics and plumbing. My dad was a plumber and I’m preparing to pass the certification that permits me to work on home electrics. They are, to be blunt, easy. An average person can pick up most of it in a couple of months. Electrics and gas plumbing carry a certification requirement because an error can kill someone, but it’s easier than passing a driving test. Obviously, there are higher tiers of those trades that require a lot more training, but even those aren’t really comparable to the level of knowledge and study needed to become a qualified doctor, let alone a consultant. In the UK, shortages of tradespeople are less to do with the difficulty of training, or lack of course capacity, and more to do with people really just not wanting to do the job, for various reasons.

lesam 3y ago
Medicine has more barriers to entry at least partly because we’ve decided to erect them. Doctors learn all kinds of things outside their direct specialty that they don’t really need to know, but nobody inside the system has an incentive to streamline medical education or to encourage more and earlier specialization. For example, we force most doctors to take a 4 year degree before medicine (sometimes pre-med, but often an arts or non-biological science degree). Wasting 4 years of a future doctor’s prime career on an expensive and often irrelevant screening program is extremely wasteful for society as a whole.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  > Wasting 4 years of a future doctor’s prime career on an expensive and often irrelevant screening program is extremely wasteful for society as a whole I have a cousin who's doing his residency right now and he has an interesting take on this. You don't want to have a 21 year old in a cancer ward directly treating patients. They may lack the personal skills and life experience needed to convey empathy. In addition, they will not be taken seriously by patients due to their youth. He is speaking from experience as someone who is doing his residency at a slightly younger age than average.
  - SkyPuncher 3y ago
    > You don't want to have a 21 year old in a cancer ward directly treating patients. They may lack the personal skills and life experience needed to convey empathy. In addition, they will not be taken seriously by patients due to their youth. I just don't buy this take. You don't let the junior engineer wild in production. You place guardrails around them until they learn and prove themselves as capable. The exact same thing can be done in medicine.
    - alephnerd 3y ago
      There isn't enough staff to manage teaching AND medical care at hospitals. Shadowing/Interning is already done in your MD program. In Engineering, you will generally have 1 engineer paired with 1 intern/NCG. In a hospital setting that is an unrealistic ratio given the relative lack of staffing. Add to that liability related issues because unlike CS, you as a medical professional can be held legally liable. This of course leads to high malpractice insurance rates subsidized by the hospital, who then in turn also need to show insurers that they are doing the needful.
      - ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
        > There isn't enough staff to manage teaching AND medical care at hospitals. The complaint "we can't spend the time to train new employees" isn't specific to the medical field, but the solution is the same: they can't afford NOT to, and the lack of staff is proof of it. The last plan ended in the failure we're at now (no staff available to train new staff). The best time for staff to start training more staff was before they ran out of staff. The next best time is now. The rub is that lack of staff isn't what prevents this, nor is even lack of staff time. It's a conscious, short-term-focused decision by hospitals to focus efforts outwards on making more money, rather than inwards on training or changing the status quo. And honestly, the long-term herculean task of changing the existing resident system seems, in my opinion, out of scope and fantastical for the average hospital.
        haldujai 3y ago

lesam 3y ago

Medicine has more barriers to entry at least partly because we’ve decided to erect them. Doctors learn all kinds of things outside their direct specialty that they don’t really need to know, but nobody inside the system has an incentive to streamline medical education or to encourage more and earlier specialization. For example, we force most doctors to take a 4 year degree before medicine (sometimes pre-med, but often an arts or non-biological science degree). Wasting 4 years of a future doctor’s prime career on an expensive and often irrelevant screening program is extremely wasteful for society as a whole.

alephnerd 3y ago
> Wasting 4 years of a future doctor’s prime career on an expensive and often irrelevant screening program is extremely wasteful for society as a whole I have a cousin who's doing his residency right now and he has an interesting take on this. You don't want to have a 21 year old in a cancer ward directly treating patients. They may lack the personal skills and life experience needed to convey empathy. In addition, they will not be taken seriously by patients due to their youth. He is speaking from experience as someone who is doing his residency at a slightly younger age than average.
- SkyPuncher 3y ago
  > You don't want to have a 21 year old in a cancer ward directly treating patients. They may lack the personal skills and life experience needed to convey empathy. In addition, they will not be taken seriously by patients due to their youth. I just don't buy this take. You don't let the junior engineer wild in production. You place guardrails around them until they learn and prove themselves as capable. The exact same thing can be done in medicine.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    There isn't enough staff to manage teaching AND medical care at hospitals. Shadowing/Interning is already done in your MD program. In Engineering, you will generally have 1 engineer paired with 1 intern/NCG. In a hospital setting that is an unrealistic ratio given the relative lack of staffing. Add to that liability related issues because unlike CS, you as a medical professional can be held legally liable. This of course leads to high malpractice insurance rates subsidized by the hospital, who then in turn also need to show insurers that they are doing the needful.
    - ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
      > There isn't enough staff to manage teaching AND medical care at hospitals. The complaint "we can't spend the time to train new employees" isn't specific to the medical field, but the solution is the same: they can't afford NOT to, and the lack of staff is proof of it. The last plan ended in the failure we're at now (no staff available to train new staff). The best time for staff to start training more staff was before they ran out of staff. The next best time is now. The rub is that lack of staff isn't what prevents this, nor is even lack of staff time. It's a conscious, short-term-focused decision by hospitals to focus efforts outwards on making more money, rather than inwards on training or changing the status quo. And honestly, the long-term herculean task of changing the existing resident system seems, in my opinion, out of scope and fantastical for the average hospital.
      - haldujai 3y ago