Your nurses of the future.

[Lao Tzu]

so youre going to suck the health care industry into more of a black hole of competition for cheap labor. MD's pay their dues. nurses dont to the same degree.

no nurses don't pay the dues that doctors do. however a BSN with a 2 year grad degree deserves some credit, even if its not the credit an MD deserves.

The reality is in the US we spend 15% of GDP on healthcare and healthcare costs are increasing at about 2-6x the rate of inflation. Plus medicaid/medicare spend about 45% of all healthcare dollars in the US. cutting corners will become more & more necessary and the mentality that a 300k doctor is a god and a 60k physicians assistant or nurse practitioner is incompetent is a myth. I went to the local health clinic to get some vaccinations a month ago. they had no MD on staff, jsut some RNs, LPNs and a nurse practitioner. The cost of the vaccines was 1/3 what it would've cost if i'd gone to an MD to have them done. things like that will probably become more common.

 

[MattTheSkywalker]

i'm pretty sure they get the same drugs we do. Their government is just able to negotiate a lower price. Not only that but pharma companies only spend about 13% of their budgets on R&D, they make a 22% profit margin too. Most other companies make 3% profits.

And alot of the new drugs are just newer drugs for illnesses that already have a class of drugs for them. they are offering new drugs that do what pre-existing drugs already do for 5x the price. Thats not to say there are not improvements but a reasonable amount of the time there are already a large group of drugs for the condition the new drug was invented for.

Nord,

The regulatory controls on th drugs they have are far less stringent.

Many of the drugs they have are the same, but there is a massive black and gray market there as well. Drugs marked for export form Canada are never exported, instead sold to Canda and Americans as if they were the original American drug. These drugs are usually formulated entirely differently

This is rampant.


JuicedMullet -

Socialized healthcare is a otouchy issue. Just look at the way it is adminsitered over there: do they have gateway docs, etc. every doc I know - and I know hundreds, tells me we have teh best system....not all American docs either.

Socialzied health care works for many basic conditions, but no one dies from a broken leg. Advanced treatments are where these countries really suck; transplants etc.

 

[javaguru]

Socialzied health care works for many basic conditions, but no one dies from a broken leg. Advanced treatments are where these countries really suck; transplants etc.

An interesting study conducted a few years back compared Canadian treatment for cardiac patients(diet, exercise, drugs) to the American system which adds expensive surgery to the above mixture and found no difference in survival rates. I guess that I'm just pissed off my health care costs are influenced by all the fat ass grease disposals I see every day.

 

[MattTheSkywalker]

An interesting study conducted a few years back compared Canadian treatment for cardiac patients(diet, exercise, drugs) to the American system which adds expensive surgery to the above mixture and found no difference in survival rates. I guess that I'm just pissed off my health care costs are influenced by all the fat ass grease disposals I see every day.

Well, the thing about those studies is that they are so biased to whatever agenda the group has.

My stories don't have statistical weight, they are anecdotal from doctors who attend a lot of the pharma meetings I am invovled in.

 

[javaguru]

Everyone has an agenda, including doctors, that's why we have peer reviewed articles and accepted methods for conducting studies. Admittedly, these can still be manipulated just like the FDA drug approval process. I do know that mahor surgery is a VERY traumatic procedure and IMO performing it on the average 70 year is often more detrimental than helpful from what I've seen in my own relatives.

Concerning doctor's agendas. My ex-wife's uncle is an Orthopod and he brought up steroids and joint damage during one of our discussions. He basically said that having spoken with the Orthopod of a pro team at a conference AAS use was the primary cause of joint damage and career ending injuries in NFL players. I asked him how often he gave cortisone injections to his patients, his answer was once every six months. I then asked him why not more frequently, "because frequent cortisone injections cause joint degeneration." I then informed him it wasn't uncommon for injured players to be given weekly cortisone injections and pain killers to continue to play and asked him if the orthopod brought that up. I think he got my point.

 

[danielson]

no nurses don't pay the dues that doctors do. however a BSN with a 2 year grad degree deserves some credit, even if its not the credit an MD deserves.

The reality is in the US we spend 15% of GDP on healthcare and healthcare costs are increasing at about 2-6x the rate of inflation. Plus medicaid/medicare spend about 45% of all healthcare dollars in the US. cutting corners will become more & more necessary and the mentality that a 300k doctor is a god and a 60k physicians assistant or nurse practitioner is incompetent is a myth. I went to the local health clinic to get some vaccinations a month ago. they had no MD on staff, jsut some RNs, LPNs and a nurse practitioner. The cost of the vaccines was 1/3 what it would've cost if i'd gone to an MD to have them done. things like that will probably become more common.

administration of drugs/medication doesnt always need to be done by a doctor, but if you had a complication due to the vaccine i think it would be far more appropriate to have a doctor on standby

there is a large amount of medical care that can be covered by nurses, and if they receive specific training they can be EXTREMELY good at their job, but ultimately you still need the doctors there, all those years of medical training were given for a reason. remove them and you ask for trouble. bear in mind who decides the medication that is administered as well. i;ve been at a hospital where junior doctors were taken ourt of the equation and replaced with lots of nurses and it didnt work nearly as well

as for the 50% figure....i doubt its that high....but bear in mind the sheer number of differential diagnosis there are for diseases....and how easily they can be made, it boggles the mind. differentiating between a bad viral infection and leukaemia can be extremely difficult for your average doctr, especially of all he see;s are the viral infections. people don;t realise how easy it is, but still somehow expect 100% efficiency from someone who is human trying to diagnose another human....the error that can ceep in is astounding.

 

[juiceddreadlocks]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Your nurses of the future.

my entire existence hinges on two things
my squat max
and my mcat score
not necessarily in that order either.

what really stinks is that now every chem class that i take is the kind of class where a 56 is an A, so im going to be pulling my teeth out about my gpa for a year and a half while i get biochem I, II and quant out of the way, and maybe an independent study over the pharmacokinetetics of several common drugs for elective credit. (my biochem teacher is very interested in that stuff)

 

[Lao Tzu]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Your nurses of the future.

what really stinks is that now every chem class that i take is the kind of class where a 56 is an A, so im going to be pulling my teeth out about my gpa for a year and a half while i get biochem I, II and quant out of the way, and maybe an independent study over the pharmacokinetetics of several common drugs for elective credit. (my biochem teacher is very interested in that stuff)

a 10% was passing in my brothers organic chem class last year.

 

[Lord_Suston]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Your nurses of the future.

a 10% was passing in my brothers organic chem class last year.

I hope you are joking, Most Rn's I work with had a Bachelors about 70%, and the others Associate degress. But the trend is changing due to the average age of a nurse is in their 40-50's. I will give some credit for the knowledge they have but ultimately they have not been trained to diagnose and administer drugs. Saying they should because of experience is very risky because of the lack of experience with drug interactions. I have worked with nurses right out of school and they need to train for at least six months untill they get the swing of things; from medications, critical care situation, paperwork ect... That time is just to get accustomed to nursing, yet many say let them prescribe. That is why there are NP's they need a masters and have a year in critical care and take pharacology classes.

LPN's get very little respect due to fact they go to school for 14 months or so and can't even give IV meds, they are a real burden for other RN's

Most RN's in my former hospital were just lazy, they were there for 20 years or so adn thought they had tenure. So they would sit around and complain all day while the aids did the grunt work and the docs re-checked their work to make sure no one keeled over from some missed labs the nurse forgot to get.

Mis-diagnosis- most are due to the huge amount of doctors we import from other nations each year, The command of english is always in question and have been shown to one of the major causes of mis-diagnosis.


Mullet; I wish my professor were that leanient, no curve ever, out of a class of 128 in biochem 1 only 62 passed, roughly 45 got d's and only 3 got a's. I was lucky enough to get out of their alive

 

[biteme]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Your nurses of the future.

I hope you are joking, Most Rn's I work with had a Bachelors about 70%, and the others Associate degress. But the trend is changing due to the average age of a nurse is in their 40-50's. I will give some credit for the knowledge they have but ultimately they have not been trained to diagnose and administer drugs. Saying they should because of experience is very risky because of the lack of experience with drug interactions. I have worked with nurses right out of school and they need to train for at least six months untill they get the swing of things; from medications, critical care situation, paperwork ect... That time is just to get accustomed to nursing, yet many say let them prescribe. That is why there are NP's they need a masters and have a year in critical care and take pharacology classes.

LPN's get very little respect due to fact they go to school for 14 months or so and can't even give IV meds, they are a real burden for other RN's

Most RN's in my former hospital were just lazy, they were there for 20 years or so adn thought they had tenure. So they would sit around and complain all day while the aids did the grunt work and the docs re-checked their work to make sure no one keeled over from some missed labs the nurse forgot to get.

Mis-diagnosis- most are due to the huge amount of doctors we import from other nations each year, The command of english is always in question and have been shown to one of the major causes of mis-diagnosis.


Mullet; I wish my professor were that leanient, no curve ever, out of a class of 128 in biochem 1 only 62 passed, roughly 45 got d's and only 3 got a's. I was lucky enough to get out of their alive

My anatomy class was graded on class average. I had the highest score out of over 200 students. Granted, it was at a junior college, but I'm proud of it anyway.