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Conclusion of reducing health care costs
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The void in available literature outline that the importance of the role of healthcare providers has been seemingly underestimated when determining legitimate initiatives for the improvement of healthcare and health outcomes in low to middle-income nations. When documenting key health determinants for a developing country, lack of access to healthcare is included among characteristics of a weak healthcare infrastructure; other characteristics often include undeveloped technology and low education and socio-economic levels in target populations. Common strategies in strengthening healthcare systems, however, usually only include creating hospital centers in rural areas, providing for transportation of patients, and increasing awareness and prevention of disease. There are very few studies that can be found regarding the status of current or future healthcare workers, the availability of workers, or the use of training new, permanent health workers as a resource for improving access to care .
Recently, the trend of a diminishing physician population has been identified as a great concern to healthcare systems across the globe. Both developing and developed nations are facing a shortage of physicians and nurses now or in the near future. While developing nations are experiencing a loss of investment in training doctors and nurses as they emigrate to practice in high-income countries, the immigrant physicians do not suffice for reversing the falling ratio of doctors to patients seen even in the developed world 9. Provided with higher pay, better work conditions, and a lower number of patients in upper-income countries, physician retention has become a major concern in countries already experiencing low health expenditures and physici...
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...pean Association of Development Research & Training Institutes (EADI) VIIIth General Conference, Vienna September 1996. p. 3
10. Orubuloye, IO, OY Oyeneye. (1982). “Primary health care in developing countries: the case of Nigeria, Sri Lanka and Tanzania.” Soc Sci Med 16: 675-686.
11. Salsberg, E, A Grover. (2006). “Physician workforce shortages: implications and issues for academic health centers and policymakers.” Academic Medicine 81(9): 782-787.
12. Withanachchi, N, A Okitsu, et al. (2007). "Resource allocation in public hospitals: Is it effective?" Health Policy 80(2): 308-13.
13. World Health Organization. "Sri Lanka." World Health Organization. 2012. < http://www.who.int/countries/lka/en/>.
14. Hooker, RS, CM Everett. 2012. “The contributions of physician assistants in primary care systems.” Health and Social Care in the Community 20(1): 20-31.
In the 1990s the government made the decision to cut back on physician production because it though that it had enough physicians (Dauphinee, 2005). This lead to the greatest net loss of Canadian physicians to other countries, primarily the united states (Dauphinee, 2005). It was approximated that 508 physicians left in 1996 (Dauphinee, 2005).
Ranked third by U.S. News and World Report on the list of “Best Health Care Jobs of 2017”, the Physician Assistant career has a 96 percent job-satisfaction rate, and represents one of the fastest growing jobs in the nation. Created as a position to relieve the job shortage of primary care physicians, Physician Assistants first came to be in the mid-1960s. Since then, the number of PAs in practice has just about doubled with every decade helping to improve health care not just nationally, but on a global level as well. Physician Assistants are licensed to practice medicine, prescribe medication, treat chronic illnesses, and assist in surgery in all 50 states under supervision of a physician. Although some medical practitioners perceive the role
I believe that people everywhere should always have access to adequate medical care. Where you live should not determine whether you live, and the PA profession was created to improve the availability of healthcare in rural and other underserved areas. As a PA, I would be eager to help people have not had access to the care they needed. I want to serve those that need medical attention but don’t have the means to obtain it—whether in rural Michigan, the inner-city of Atlanta, or the backwoods of Arkansas. Making great medical care accessible to all is crucial to improving public health, and it is a necessity across this country and the world. As a physician assistant,
The medical field is among the largest and ever growing career fields, especially when dealing with Physician Assistants (PAs) and Nurse Practitioners (NPs). In the 1960’s when the physician shortage began, the medical field created the PA and NP positions to fill in the gaps (Curren, 2007, p. 404). This matter has opened up numerous questions as more and more PAs and NPs begin practicing, especially concerning their education level. Many patients are concerned that they will not get the proper care. PAs/NPs are beneficial to everyday life by providing patients with the necessary skills needed to successfully treat them.
It has been said by many experts that there has been a surplus of physicians in the past, but that there will soon be a shortage of physicians. This shortage will have been instigated by many factors, and is predicted to have various effects on society, both immediate and long term. There have been proposed solutions to this shortage, but there is a fine balance to be found with these many solutions and factors. However, once this balance is found, the long-term mending of the physician shortage may begin.
It is no secret that the current healthcare reform is a contentious matter that promises to transform the way Americans view an already complex healthcare system. The newly insured population is expected to increase by an estimated 32 million while facing an expected shortage of up to 44,000 primary care physicians within the next 12 years (Doherty, 2010). Amidst these already overwhelming challenges, healthcare systems are becoming increasingly scrutinized to identify ways to improve cost containment and patient access (Curits & Netten, 2007). “Growing awareness of the importance of health promotion and disease prevention, the increased complexity of community-based care, and the need to use scarce human healthcare resources, especially family physicians, far more efficiently and effectively, have resulted in increased emphasis on primary healthcare renewal.” (Bailey, Jones & Way, 2006, p. 381).
Barton, P. (2010). Understanding the U.S. health services system (4th ed.). Chicago: Health Administration Press.
At Seton Hill, I will be a student of the 5-year physician assistant program. From visiting campus and interviewing with the PA program staff, I am confident that Seton Hill will shape me into a competent and compassionate medical professional. Furthermore, I am confident that my fellow students and I will have an opportunity to make a difference in the community. A main pillar of the physician assistant career is catering the underserved populations. With a simple internet search, anyone can deduce
In conclusion, the ultimate significance to this type of work is to improve the quality of healthcare in these extremely impoverished nations. This argument is represented in Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains, Monte Leach’s “Ensuring Health Care as a Global Human Right”, and Darshark Sanghavi’s “Is it Cost Effective to Treat the World’s Poor.” The idea that universal healthcare is a human right is argued against in Michael F. Cannon’s “A “Right” to health care?” Cannon claims that it would not work, and fills the holes that the other authors leave in their arguments. All of these articles share the same ultimate goal, and that is to provide every individual with adequate health care, and to not let so many people die from things that could easily have been prevented or treated.
Regardless of the best attempts of medical professionals and educators to increase the workforce over the past, shortages are anticipated in every health care profession. The estimated supply of workers fails to meet the need related with population growth and aging of the population. With the continuous necessity for medical services for the millions who are projected to sign up for Medicaid and the federal and state insurance exchanges, the labor force shortages could become devastating.
As long as the AMA restricts the number of new physicians being trained, and leaving the U.S. unable significantly increase the supply of physicians to meet the changing demographics and the additional people receiving health care from the ACA, health care costs will rise. Several alternatives have been proposed to lessen the effects of the shortage of physicians. First, physicians could reduce the average time spent with patients, allowing them to see more patients. Second, nurse practitioners and physician assistants could be utilized more efficiently to reduce the burden on physicians and provide health care to greater numbers of people.
One downfall of the system is a lack of diversity in care providers. Evidence shows that 13% of the U.S. population is black, but only 4% of U.S. physicians are black [4]. Diversity in the health care workforce is important because minority doctors are more likely to practice in underserved areas treating minority patients [6], which increases access to a provider for these groups. Also, having diverse providers in the workplace is an organizational way to provide education to other providers who may not have been exposed to different cultures and beliefs, increasing awareness among all providers about the necessity to remain culturally sensitive [7]. However, the data shows that most medical school graduates continue to be white and the number of black men completing medical school has been trending downwards since 1997. This deficit in minority care providers can be attributed to a decreased ability for schools in areas with high populations of minorities to prepare students for college, a lack of federal support in such areas, and the financial inability for these students to pursue higher education [6]. As seen in Figure 2, by a very large margin, white medical school graduates are the majority (green) while black (purple), Hispanic (blue), and American Indian (red) graduates are greatly underrepresented [7]. Not only are there racial disparities in the distribution of medical students, but they also exist in medical school faculty. This is significant because it creates an environment in which black medical students lack a significant presence of role models in their educational setting. A study described in Ansell et al. showed that black faculty members were less likely to have been retained than any other group. They were also less likely to be promoted, to hold senior faculty or administrative positions, and
My educational experiences sparked my first consideration of a career in physician assistant and encouraged me to further explore this interest. At the same time, I started giving community services to healthcare. My first opportunity to personally interact with the patient was in the emergency department as a volunteer at Dekalb Medical Center. The first day I stepped onto the floor, my
With the explosive growth in the 1990s of managed care that were sold by health insurance companies, physicians were suddenly renamed “providers.” That began the deprofessionalization of medicine, and within a short time patient became “consumers” (The New York Times). The shifts in American medicine are clearly leading to physicians' losing power, which results in deprofessionalization. The subsequent deprofessionalization of physicians should not surprise Americans. Although many people spend time and effort evaluating the present state of medicine, they fail to integrate an important piece of information: physicians and sociologists predicted all of today's events more than ten years ago (Hensel, 1988).
Basco, W., & Rimsza, M. (2013). Pediatrician Workforce Policy Statement. PEDIATRICS,132(2), 390-397. Retrieved September 18, 2014, from