It's all just another business isn't it?

[Chief Resident]

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Medicine, the big business of processing (or "treating" as it's called to be politically correct) the customers/clients ("patients") for money. So many studies on ways to decrease length of stay to the point of escorting people out the hospital doors and playing it off as if because they were in the hospital for a shorter time then that means whatever they were doing was more effective (read: saved them more money).

But there's so much more to this, and we're the minions in training to keep these big people processing centers ("hospitals") going.

 

[Blue Haze]

Well...that's the side of it that's generally unspoken. It's also, all the other (less bleak) things that we say about it. Sure, medicine is a bussiness. But it's not just a bussiness. We help people make their way through times when their life and future hang in the balance and enable them to regain health. If that's not a noble calling then I don't know what is.

 

[docB]

There is another way to look at all of this. The malpractice crisis has made everyone so paranoid, defensive and conservative that the hospitals are filled will silliness. To some degree the hospitals are trying to swing the pendulum back.

 

[TommyGunn04]

I'm with Blue Haze on this one...medicine surely isn't just a business, although business enters into certain aspects of the profession depending on how/where you practice, and in what particualr field. Medicine is also a "profession" in the full sense of the word, for as physicians we "profess" our common oath in our daily actions, in our serving those who are ill.

That said, I can also think of many reasons for shortening hospital stays that don't necessarily involve money. I'm all for getting patients out the door ASAP, but it's not because I care about costs or about lightening my workload, but because the hospital is a really bad place to be if you don't really need to be there. Hospitalized patients get deconiditioned, get DVT's and PE's, pick up resistant organisms, etc. etc. So in being driven by doing what I think is best for the patient, I may also incidentally be serving some sort of business role, but it's surely not my intention. Although, I'd challenge the notion that kicking people out the door is "cost effective." My understanding is that hospitals make a lot of money on inpatients. Case in point, Duke just made $75.6 million this year, a year in which there were 1,000 more inpatients than usual.

 

[abcxyz0123]

this is probably a dumb question, but if hospitals are so bad for patients who don't need to be there, what is protecting doctors from getting sick all the time themselves?

 

[Poety]

medicine most certainly is a business, and at the forefront of it all, it is a customer service biz..

customer service is TOUGH, ironically, I think about how I used to say "I would never do customer service" "those poor customer service people with what they have to endure"... hmmm

 

[TommyGunn04]

this is probably a dumb question, but if hospitals are so bad for patients who don't need to be there, what is protecting doctors from getting sick all the time themselves?

Doctors are often the vectors too! We're carrying MRSA around on our ties, coats, and stethoscopes 😱

But doctors aren't always sick because they're relatively healthy, and patients in the hospital are generally not healthy and are thus vulnerable to all the badness that can occur. Even relatively healthy people who are hospitalized for surgery, for example, are vulnerable to these bad things by nature of what happens when you're a patient, including being confined to bed, getting anesthesia, etc. (PE's, post-op fever/atelectasis, DVT's, and the like)