Nurse practitioners could help fill the void, advocates for the profession say, if more provinces would adopt policies to integrate them into primary care and pay them fairly for their work. Some physicians’ organizations have pushed back against that approach, arguing that NPs don’t have as much training or education as family doctors and therefore should only be funded publicly when they’re embedded in interdisciplinary teams with MDs.
Aren’t these the same organizations that have been dragging their feet on recognizing foreign credentials?
I’ve been seeing a nurse practitioner for the last couple of years. So far, she’s provided the same level of care I’m used to from family doctors: prescriptions, forwarding me to specialists when appropriate, providing the usual advice during checkups. It’s fine.
Edit: took out my grumbly summary, since our healthcare spending seems to be middle of the pack, compared to peer countries.
Maybe we should, as a society, make the profession of physician suitably attractive so that we don’t have a huge shortage of qualified people motivated to do this job instead of having this generation’s clever people working out how to make people watch more ads.
Oh there’s so many people who want to be doctors! No shortage of that.
What ends up is the extremely difficult admission process, poor mentorship/training structure, long work hours, and low salary; at the end you are rewarded with high salary and prestige, but very few makes it that far.
There are lots of people who want to get into healthcare. We don’t have enough spots in post secondary education to train them all.
We refuse to hire some trained healthcare providers, like the nurse practitioners described in the article, and folks with credentials from elsewhere.
We have the people. We don’t have the will to employ them properly.
Woah, slow down there, commie. I can still kind of do stuff, like watch TV or games without being completely blocked by advertisements. There’s still value to be wrung out for the shareholder. Why do you hate freedom?