1) An internal medicine physician opened up a retail store selling preventive services.
My take: An innovate way to market primary care knowledge. Let’s see if the public appropriately values it for this model to be successful.
2) Resident work-hour caps seem to be adversely affecting the quality of graduating surgeons.
My take: Restricting resident hours impacts specialties in different ways.
In internal medicine, this results in increased hand-offs between doctors which negatively affects continuity of care and increases the frequency of medical errors from miscommunication. However, I would hypothesize that there isn’t a significant impact on internists’ training.
Surgeons and proceduralists need to hone their hand-eye skills, and that only comes with practice and experience. Restricting their hours, and subsequently the number of surgeries they can perform, possibly may have bigger repercussions.
I would be more concerned about an inexperienced surgeon who didn’t operate enough than an internist who wasn’t as versed in continuity of care.
Rather than a blunt rule applying to all residents, perhaps a more nuanced application of restricting surgeon and proceduralist work-hours needs to be considered.
3) The backlash against female physicians spreads to the UK in a BMJ article.
My take: The concern seems to be the influx of part-time physicians, who tend to be women. The cost of training a doctor remains the same, regardless of how much they work. Thus, the growing trend of part-time physicians may not be the wisest allocation of medical training resources.
However, changing this trend would require a “revolution in the attitude of society towards childcare and who has the responsibility for childcare.”
Is it realistic to expect that?
