The Business of Health Care Depends on Exploiting Doctors and Nurses [View all]
You are at your daughters recital and you get a call that your elderly patients son needs to talk to you urgently. A colleague has a family emergency and the hospital needs you to work a double shift. Your patients M.R.I. isnt covered and the only option is for you to call the insurance company and argue it out. Youre only allotted 15 minutes for a visit, but your patients medical needs require 45.
These quandaries are standard issue for doctors and nurses. Luckily, the response is usually standard issue as well: An overwhelming majority do the right thing for their patients, even at a high personal cost.
It is true that health care has become corporatized to an almost unrecognizable degree. But it is also true that most clinicians remain committed to the ethics that brought them into the field in the first place. This makes the hospital an inspiring place to work.
Increasingly, though, Ive come to the uncomfortable realization that this ethic that I hold so dear is being cynically manipulated. By now, corporate medicine has milked just about all the efficiency it can out of the system. With mergers and streamlining, it has pushed the productivity numbers about as far as they can go. But one resource that seems endless and free is the professional ethic of medical staff members.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/08/opinion/sunday/hospitals-doctors-nurses-burnout.html