Often much deadlier than the one who was (White Coat Rants, Nov. 21)(via KevinMD).
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In Canada, courts order staffing. An armed Dudley Do Right shows up to help the doctor move to the assigned North Country clinic. Protestations of lack of coverage of the city ER fall on deaf ears.
I would not want the care of a doc seeing me at the point of a gun.
Unfortunately, lack of specialists is getting worse. In Florida especially, emergency room physicians are getting hit with floods of patients, often illegals. Because of numerous lawsuits filed in which the suit is based solely on not consulting a specialists, the Emergency Room physicians must immediately consult someone else. By definition emergency cases are more likely to have a bad outcome and as a result being called to the emergency room to see a patient means accepting all the risk. Physicians are learning that the only way to avoid potential lawsuits is to not participate in the patients care. To stay in business, they will focus on the lowest risk procedures. Attorneys will constantly state that this logic is not valid, but how many attorneys would flock to cases that they are bound to lose, to not get paid for and face the possibility of a long drawn out and costly court battle that even if nothing was done wrong will still be costly both emotionally and financially.
In medical lingo, the Emergency Department is the “Snake Pit”. If you go there, you will get bit, and there are not any snakes bites that are very good for you.
Reduced pay for MDs is a major part of specialist unwillingness to see ED patients. For thirty years I cared for ED patients. I was being paid sufficiently well for my other patients that if I ended up doing some ED cases for free, I could tolerate it. As MD pay was eroded, and as I got older of course, the prospect of getting up in the middle of the night in order to correct the results of drunk driving became less tolerable. I was not only going to lose the sleep, but also wouldn’t get paid, and wasn’t being paid well enough in my practice to gracefully accept that the ED wouldn’t pay. Hence, no more ED coverage.
I live in Northern British Columbia where we do in fact have a physician shortage and I can assure you that this is nonsense. Courts have no more power to order physicians to move to remote locations in Canada than they do in the United States.