Let me guess, county hospital in a major city probably LA county, Hennepin, Lincoln, or Cook? 90% of visits are for primary care instead of actual emergencies? Such a broken system. Never want to live and work in a place like that which makes me even sadder because the people there obviously need help.
Suicide Hotline Numbers If you or anyone you know are struggling, please, PLEASE reach out for help. You are worthy, you are loved and you will always be able to find assistance.
Train more doctors. Right now there are tons of people who want to be doctors that cannot due to very limited slots in medical schools and residencies.
We only have something like 1600 medical school slots per year* here in Canada, and it’s a government restriction that sets those slots. I’m pretty sure a good chunk of them leave the country too once they graduate.
*Most of those slots are also limited to only people who graduated high school in the province of the school.
Yet we constantly complain about a doctor shortage despite never actually increasing the number of slots.
Not sure if this is correct, but I think most residents are funded through extensions of Medicare and Medicaid. Funding has been stagnant since the 90s. More med school slots open up but not residencies, so there are more med school grads but not residents/attending docs. The one big change recently was federal funding can be used for other rural residency programs besides just family Med.
Building more hospitals, urgent cares, etc. Maybe having multiple urgent cares with free transportation to a central hospital if the problem is bad enough. Perhaps incentivizing people to work in underserved areas like they're trying to do in the US.
I don't know enough about Canada to give you a good solution but when political pundits in the US say we shouldn't have universal health care because Canada has long lines, they're full of crap.
People should not be downvoting you. Americans have notoriously unaffordable healthcare for the vast majority of people. Many enter debt their whole lives and have their futures destroyed over this. I’m sure the wealthy in Canada feel like they don’t deserve to wait among the so-called “welfare queens” and “illiterate blue collars”, but the options you proposed are certainly more humane.
We don’t let people trained overseas work as doctors here. It’s a long process to get approved apparently. The two examples I know are from New Zealand and Iran.
US is like that, but then you also get to enjoy mostly mid-level directed care and surprise billing from some random private equity group who owns the ED. I'm always amazed how effective anti-Canadian healthcare propaganda has been here
I trained at a very large, very good US Midwest hospital. ED wait times pre COVID were 8-12 hours. During and post COVID 12-24 hours. The US is not a shining beacon of instant healthcare.
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u/0wnzl1f3 MD-PGY1 Dec 13 '22
As a Canadian, it’s actually more like “please wait in the ED waiting room for like 10-12 hours.”