apologies for the confusion, by "fully deployed" I meant fully able to exercise clinical judgement - which requires adequate rest. If understaffing forces back-to-back night shifts and that becomes standard, well you clearly recognize the risk to patient safety just as well. My point is - putting hard limits and minimums on rest, forces staffing choices and this is something physician collective bargaining/organising can help with and it concerns you as a patient.
Regarding "the good doctor" and accepting a near-constant state of fatigue... this is not a personal choice, and it shouldn't be treated as such (wrapped into the box of "the price of this qualification/profession" type of stories). From my experience and I don't claim to be the authority on understanding all aspects of this problem, it's 1. part structural - not enough people (AMA's anti-expansion positions really didn't help here, true) and high demand... and 2. part cultural: medicine has normalised "heroic" endurance which makes it convenient to focus on economics and not see fatigue for what it is - safety risk. The cultural narrative isn't exclusive to medicine.
anyway, I hope community appreciates a perspective from the other side of that organisation, I was hoping to illustrate we ultimately share the same goal - better patient outcomes and safety.
Nope. If allowing sufficient staff to graduate such that hospitals are staffed isn’t on your todo list as an organization, then there had better be money allocated to ensure you can pay people to show up.
Chronic (decades) understaffing while profits remain at record highs means you kept too much money. It doesn’t take an accountant to do that math.
I have an idea of where to get the money, too: the ever-increasing revenue streams, ever-increasing admin pay, and ever-increasing shareholder payout,
again, at minimum until the organization is operating at a bare minimum for a first-world country, able to do basic things like childbirth better than nations with comparatively no money...
Regarding "the good doctor" and accepting a near-constant state of fatigue... this is not a personal choice, and it shouldn't be treated as such (wrapped into the box of "the price of this qualification/profession" type of stories). From my experience and I don't claim to be the authority on understanding all aspects of this problem, it's 1. part structural - not enough people (AMA's anti-expansion positions really didn't help here, true) and high demand... and 2. part cultural: medicine has normalised "heroic" endurance which makes it convenient to focus on economics and not see fatigue for what it is - safety risk. The cultural narrative isn't exclusive to medicine.
anyway, I hope community appreciates a perspective from the other side of that organisation, I was hoping to illustrate we ultimately share the same goal - better patient outcomes and safety.