Bear in mind this ENT surgeon is still in training, and probably close to 40 years old assuming he started Uni at 18. Training is often brutal because towards the end you are probably among the most important and useful people in the hospital in terms of delivering care, but also have very little control, so of course you get abused. Eg this guy has to write medical certificates as well as perform emergency life saving surgery at 2am and have crushing family meetings with patients dying from untreatable head and neck cancers.
Simplistic supply and demand analysis of this issue is annoying and ignores basic economic theory.
You don't want to increase doctor supply, you want to increase the capacity of the healthcare system to deliver good care (obviously?). Doctor supply is one part of that, but if you pump medical students in at one end and do nothing else, you will fail - this is what the Australian gov has done, and you can see the result here, where trainee conditions are poor (so much competition that you don't complain about conditions, power is concentrated in hospitals and senior drs in charge of training programs and hiring who align the system in their favour), and incumbent physicians like the one that committed suicide work like demons and burn out.
The financial corollary is fiscal stimulus without any production capacity - GDP doesn't go up, inflation does.
As always, it doesn't have to be this way, but nobody is in charge who cares enough to fix it, and all the stakeholders look after their own interests.
Simplistic supply and demand analysis of this issue is annoying and ignores basic economic theory.
You don't want to increase doctor supply, you want to increase the capacity of the healthcare system to deliver good care (obviously?). Doctor supply is one part of that, but if you pump medical students in at one end and do nothing else, you will fail - this is what the Australian gov has done, and you can see the result here, where trainee conditions are poor (so much competition that you don't complain about conditions, power is concentrated in hospitals and senior drs in charge of training programs and hiring who align the system in their favour), and incumbent physicians like the one that committed suicide work like demons and burn out.
The financial corollary is fiscal stimulus without any production capacity - GDP doesn't go up, inflation does.
As always, it doesn't have to be this way, but nobody is in charge who cares enough to fix it, and all the stakeholders look after their own interests.