What value a medical degree?

It seems that the Australians have more balls than the British, down under the Australian government is trying to force through various destructive dumbing down reforms that empower those without medical degrees to jobs that previously required much higher levels of education and training. The Chairman of the Australian Doctor's Fund is clear with his message:

"Who would subject themselves to the rigours of a medical degree when it is so much easier to obtain a nursing degree and be jumped into a medical role?

In other words Ms Roxon has to decide whether she wants doctors or nurses to be the ultimate decision maker on the care of patients. Sadly our leaders seem to be unaware of the problem or seem to think that simply by announcing it, their job is done. Sadly those driven by ideology rarely succumb to reasoned argument; backed by million dollar budgets and armies of public servants they play with their half-baked ideas and impose them on those who know better.

It is our duty and our intent to prevent these destroyers of the culture of medicine from achieving their goals. It is our duty to assert and intervene in all possible ways to make sure that a medical degree, and all the discipline required to achieve it, is given its rightful place, namely signifying leadership in medical care.

This is the model that has delivered Australians world-class medical treatment. There is no reason or compelling case to dismantle it.

When I worked in England many years ago I was appalled that there seemed no one who took personal responsibility for a patient. Let us not go down the same road here."

Ms Roxon is the Health Minister who is coming up with the half-baked ideas, the parallels to the UK are obvious, and these half-baked ideas are very much a threat to world-class medical treatment, once the dumbing down starts it is hard to stop. The Australian Government is also trying to replace GPs as the cornerstone of Australian medical practice, in a way that draws striking parallels to what the Labour government has done here in order to usher through the privatisation of the NHS. A former Australian Medical Association chief has this to say:

" If nurses want to be doctors, trained to take a history, examine, investigate, diagnose and
formulate a management plan with the depth of knowledge required for the possibility of
differential diagnoses, then they should apply to medical school…."

This quote from another big cheese shows how the Australians are trying to push through exactly the same dumbing down agenda as has been done in the UK, it matters not what education, skill or training anyone has, you can all be 'doctors'! But then what will the word doctor come to mean?

"And, interestingly, there is a push for another change – namely, that all practitioners
working in primary care, irrespective of their qualifications and expertise, be now called
“doctor”. Such a collaborative model readily brings to mind the sovietisation of health
care."

There is a problem with bananas, this half-baked philosophy of cutting the number of properly trained staff won't even save money; it is expensive, bad for patient care but it does allow the government to push through it's privatisation schemes more easily. The NHS Skills Escalator looks like it were drawn up by a braindead slug on crack, but sadly this is a creation of our retarded overlords in government and it is being pushed through regardless of its utter stupidity.

Good luck to the Australians in resisting this destruction of their excellent health care system, it will be hard as the government have buddied up with the Australian Nursing Federation and seem determined to repeat the damage that has been done in the UK. They have established a 'National Health Workforce Agency' which may well be another prong in their attack on medical professionalism and standards.

It is sad that there are so many people out there who are too stupid to see the wood for the trees. It matters not whether people are called doctors, nurses, paramedics or monkeys. The labels to things do not matter, relabelling a useless product does not make it better. It is as simple an argument as less education and training makes for a lower quality of care. After all if the government announced plans to train doctors in about three months then I am sure everyone would be up in arms, so why do some idiots find it acceptable to convert nurses into doctors with an even shorter period of training? There isn't even any decent evidence to show that it is safe. In life you get what you pay for, less investment in training people properly will get you a poorer service, it won't magically save you money and provide as good a service.

"The Cochrane Collaboration summary on the equivalence of GP-led and nurse-led care has more disclaimers than a set of K-Tel steak knives. Most damning is the statement that these findings “should be viewed with caution given that only one study was powered to assess equivalence of care, and many studies had methodological limitations”. So, Australian policy-makers, reformers and governments beware – 50 years of general practice hard slog has resulted in international benchmarking for key health outcomes, and unsurpassed general practice patient satisfaction."
(Prof Claire Jackson, The ‘little sick/big sick’ myth of general practice, Australian Doctor, 19/10/09)