Economy

My long term belief is that going into medicine is bad. Very bad. There always seemed to be much easier ways to earn a living. Now I am not so sure. It seems in the current economy you need to have a significant skill to get or keep a job. This is counter balanced by the ever growing regulations being put on doctors and hospitals that are all about patient safety, but which actually are more about justifying the regulators existence than improving patient safety.

This is all theoretical, but here are real life examples from the last month of my life

1. Our hospital lab is inspected by a certain organization every 2 years. This year we were given a "bad mark" for violating a standard that says we do not document that our cytology slide readers (in our case, pathologists) do not read more than 100 slides in 24 hours. This standard comes out of the old Pap smear mills that read way too many slides a day (probably in part cause re-imbursement is so bad) to do an adequate job. So the standard sounds good, fresh eyes are better than tired ones. Except we did not read pap smears. We do not have 100 cytology slides a month on average. It is physically impossible for us to get that many slides a day. I have never had even 20 slides in one day. But now we have to do a quarterly report documented that we did not do something that currently is physically impossible to do.

2. We have procedures for all lab tests. We were also cited for not having a "document system" that can document that we keep up with all procedures-the who and when of when a document was written, reviewed, etc. This would require a person working literally full time, or we can go with one of the many computer vendors for a low value system that costs a minimum of 3000 dollars a month. This is money that has to come from somewhere. It sure does not help patient care. It helps us document to inspectors that we are doing our job.

Maybe becoming a national news anchor is a better idea now that I think of it.