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From CNN: Doctors switching to nursing for better pay.
- Thread starter Faebinder
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Ummmm...although yes its sad, Im not sure what your point is. Im sure a doctor over there could work as a gardener in America and earn more. If doctors in the philippines were leaving the profession to become nurses in the philippines THAT would be pathetic.
D
deleted87716
Now, if doctors in the U.S. were leaving to become nurses in the Philippines, that would be pathetic. 😉
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And how well could I live in the Phillipines (outside Manilla) on 45k a year?
This story is stupid. What do I care about medical economics in developing nations?
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We should care about medical economics in other countries. the NEJM has published a couple articles and editorials about the healthcare brain drain in developing regions. They focused predominantly on nurses and pointed out that most of the flux is toward the US and UK. They also focused on how this flux devastates the very public health initiatives we try to fund in these regions; there are often insufficient nurses and others to implement them. The outcome is the spread of infectious disease in these regions which, as we've seen with TB, can easily come to us.
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What if nurses in the USA were leaving to become doctors in the Philippines? 😉
I am hoping that in the future, when our society returns to a saner way of thinking, one of the things we will find most ridiculous about our present way of thinking is our taking for granted the migration of massive numbers of people around the globe and our complete unwillingness to believe that it's something that can be restricted. TB doesn't come to us, people who have TB come to us. If we would stop letting in people from populations known to carry TB, it wouldn't be a problem here, and American doctors could focus their time and energy on American patients instead of being told we're morally obligated to be crusaders for "global health."cchoukal said:
This kind of thing is enough to make me want to start an organization called "Doctors With Borders."
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Well, I guess you either believe that we're all in this together or you don't.
All in what together?
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Thoughts on the video:
1) Reporter said nurses in the US make 8X the docs in the Phillipines. Which tells me that there MUST be absolute caps on doc fees or else they only get paid sometihng ridiculous like $1 per patient thru the govt.
2) Reporter said that some hospitals operate without a doctor for an entire year. The only way thats possible is that the nurses have in fact taken over the doctor jobs. They must be ordering meds and doing the surgeries themselves. I'm srue the nurses there love that. They get to play doctor with none of the long training!
1) Reporter said nurses in the US make 8X the docs in the Phillipines. Which tells me that there MUST be absolute caps on doc fees or else they only get paid sometihng ridiculous like $1 per patient thru the govt.
2) Reporter said that some hospitals operate without a doctor for an entire year. The only way thats possible is that the nurses have in fact taken over the doctor jobs. They must be ordering meds and doing the surgeries themselves. I'm srue the nurses there love that. They get to play doctor with none of the long training!
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having worked with tons of filipino/filipina nurses, health care in the phillipines is pretty much nothing like that in the u.s.
in the u.s., order a blood transfusion, it gets done.
in the phillipines, order a blood transfusion, family member has to go down to the blood bank and either donate his/her blood or pay for blood. can't do that, the family member won't get the blood.
in the u.s., order a medication, it gets done.
in the phillipines, order a medicaiton, family member goes to the pharmacy and sees if the medicine is in stock. if not, off to a non hospital pharamcy. and of course, have to pay for the medication in advance.
when you see the realities of the phillipines, and that literally the #1 export out of the phillipines is its educated people, it makes you wonder what's really going on.
and the filipino/filipina people i know only go back to visit, but would never go back to the way of life there.
and we know that being a physician in another country and coming to the u.s. can prove to be quite difficult. but to be a nurse in another country and then come to the u.s. is much easier.
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I don't think your idea will work because currently, many major nations (Russia, China) have populations known to carry TB along with most other contagious diseases. Outside of developed nations, most third world countries are 'diseased'. Given how heavily graduate programs lean on graduate students imported from above, I dont' think many programs would survive if they have to avoid allowing students from India and China from coming here.
China, one of the top exporters of graduate students to this country, also has one of the highest hepatitis rates in the world (currently standing at 10%), it also has a high TB rate (and let's not forget where the avian flu came from every year). Don't think that being educated makes people immune to transmittable diseases. With global travel the way it is, all it takes is one brief trip to visit granny on the farm, then a skip and a hope on the airplane and the US gets itself another victim of TB/SARS/disease-of-the-week. Hey, I am a US citizen and I visit my grandmother's farm in China regularly. I try to avoid getting sick but it is very hard to avoid it given the nature of sanitation in the Chinese countryside so I make do and hope that I didn't bring back anything bad. However, the above scenrio is the public health official's biggest fear---it isn't the illegal Mexican sneaking in carrying scary diseases, it's the stupid American who come back unknowingly carrying some hideous new bug.
And that's why we should be concerned about 'global health'. With global travel, it is very, very easy to pass one disease to another. Unless you plan on quarantining everyone who travels abroad for weeks at a time every time they come back, those third world diseases can easily make it back to this country.
And yeah, I believe doctors are morally obligated to concern ourselves with global health. After all, where does it say that we discriminate based on nationality? 😉
I'm not sure all nurses have secret fantasies to become doctors. Typically, in countries where doctors are poorly compensated, a physician may not enjoy the high prestige that we see in this country. In China, my cousin the newly minted MD was hoping to get an airline stewardess job because it paid more than what she would get as a new doctor. I doubt anyone was looking at her with envy. 🙁
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How did you manage to confuse the practice of medicine with public health initiatives? The very basis of "public health" is to promote individual and social practices that will eliminate death and disease without having to resort to advanced medical practices. Mosquito nets, sanitation, condoms, what the hell does any of that have to do with doctors? All you really need, as so programs have demonstrated, is trained local health workers.
Worrying about a lack of surgeons in a country without access to fresh water is just dumb.
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ummm...so you're proposing we return to the dark ages and stay inside our own little homesteads? even in medieval times people traveled outside their lands in search of adventure, treasure, exploration, etc. How do you propose our society goes about conducting business? Ships, planes, etc have to transport goods around the world in order to keep trade alive (unless you want to completely destroy national economies the world over.) With travel comes disease. You don't need immigration to foster pandemics. You need a guy like that ******* who traveled to Southeast Asia for his honeymoon and came back to the U.S. with MDR-TB.
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Resurrecting an old thread, aren't we? 😉
But the TB patient was a good illustration of why we should worry about global health.
But the TB patient was a good illustration of why we should worry about global health.
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For me, job satisfaction to pay ratio would be lower as a nurse than as a physician. A lot of people say that nurses make a lot for what they do, but they do a lot of things that I would not want to do for any salary. Looking back, I think something like social work or entrepreneurship may have the highest satisfaction for pay for me... But having my M.D. opens so many more doors should I decide to change fields or become an entrepreneur, so I can't say that I completely regret this path. Who knows?
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Somebody explain to me how its possible for a hospital to operate an ENTIRE YEAR without having any doctors on staff?
There's only 2 possibilities:
1) The article is an bald-faced lie
2) Somebody else (besides doctors) are writing scripts, doing surgeries, and the rest of the daily work that doctors do.
There's only 2 possibilities:
1) The article is an bald-faced lie
2) Somebody else (besides doctors) are writing scripts, doing surgeries, and the rest of the daily work that doctors do.
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It's not a lie.
How do they function?...Well, they don't function like any hospital you've ever known. And they are not the sort of place most of us would like to visit to obtain health care.
Elwademd touched the tip of that iceberg that a little earlier in this thread.
These "hospitals w/o doctors" are in poor, remote provinces like Samar, or in other remote wartorn provinces like Sulu. In these places the health care system has basically broken down.
Large urban areas do not suffer as much, but do feel the HR effects of having states like California and Texas suck up all the experienced nurses that the Feds will give them visas for.
The downside is that large pressures are being placed on a developing nation's healthcare system by retiring US baby-boomers.
But there is an upside. Global competition for nurses is forcing major hospitals in Manila to start paying better wages and to start showing a little respect to what was previously just a pool of cheap labor.
The real problem in the Philippines is not the exodus of nurses and doctors but rather the corruption and inefficiency of a Filipino national givernment that only spends 1.1% of the national budget on healthcare.
The health care problems of the Philippines originate at home in Manila.
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Moving this thread to a more broad and appropriate forum for discussion.
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My question is why change to be a nurse? I mean --yeah I know the pay is better as a US nurse. But don't these people have the MD degree allready? Why not work as a physician in the US? Is it that hard for them to practice as physicians here? Seems like faulty logic if $$$ is their modivating factor. Right?
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This would require completion of USMLEs as well as a U.S. residency--no walk in the park.
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