Crazy analysis Drives me bananas – –
It’s a DEMAND side problem:
you might be graduating family doctors (SUPPLY),
FASTER than population growth, but we are creating sick and disabled people (demand)
FASTER than doctors.
So yes, there’s a six-year wait to get a family doctor. And that’s worse than it was five years ago.
Newscasts and analyses form our impressions.
Can’t correct problems, if the analyses are flawed.
Some of us challenge the source.
But lots of us have to talk it in the streets and networks.
By ALLOWING simplified thinking to go unchallenged, we contribute to everyone’s misfortune.
It’s not necessarily the fault of the experts and media people.
Remember the video: count the number of times the white team passes the basketball.
Human beings FOCUS. Which means we have tunnel vision on some topics.
There was a spate of newscasts about “the chronic shortage of doctors”.
The coverage demonstrates the supply versus demand question and also how numbers and “the rational” can take us down the garden path:
The interviewer was told by the earnest experts:
- It’s a six-year wait to get a family doctor
- We have done the right thing: the population is increasing at just over 1% a year. We are graduating the number of family doctors by just over 3% a year (and have been doing so for years now).
- Therefore, it’s a process problem. Too many family doctors want to be “hospitaliticians”. (Work from the hospital so they don’t have the overhead (very high) and time required to run an office.) Or, the family doctors are deployed in the wrong way. We need to re-design the system. Use more of this or that. And OF COURSE, we need more money to fix the problem.
Yes, but, the problem has been the same for a very long time. And it gets worse. BECAUSE
Amidst the complexity, there is a serious DEMAND side problem that is overlooked: you might be graduating family doctors faster than population growth, but we are creating sick and disabled people (demand) FASTER than doctors.
Most medium-size towns and the cities in agricultural areas have a Walk for Breast Cancer (find a cure – ha! Been doing that one for more than 50 years now).
A consulting company from Seattle was hired to find ways to cut costs in the Saskatoon Health district. (People from rural areas typically go to either Saskatoon or Regina for much of their medical attention.) I happened to sit on an airplane beside a woman who commuted between Seattle and Saskatoon as an employee working on the re-organization.
Before we got off the plane she said that she worked for many years in healthcare in Seattle. She had never seen the large number of children with developmental problems as she saw in the course of her work in Saskatoon.
What’s to figure out? . . . It is as though the word “carcinogen” does not mean “causes cancer”. And the word “teratogen” does not mean “causes malformation of an embryo”, “birth defects”, “congenital abnormalities”. It’s as though we know nothing about bio-accumulation. Or synergistic effects.
There’s a chronic shortage of family doctors – – stated that way, it’s a SUPPLY side problem.
NO! There is a significant DEMAND side problem. As long as we insist on treating it as supply side, our money and effort go IN THE WRONG PLACE. And hallelujah! The problem keeps escalating.