(Snippets from the frontline)
Shortage?
We have a shortage of doctors and nurses in our country, but some of these professionals are siphoned off by hospitals, insurance, and pharmaceutical companies into “utilization.” This is a desk job to assure profits are sustained.
Their duty is to bolster profiteers, yet potentially harm those seeking medical care by:
-controlling admissions, discharges, and hospital stays forcing adverse medical decision-making;
-denying professional referrals, surgical procedures, and the use of new technology;
-pressuring doctors to use inferior medication;
-deciding what test or procedure can be used diagnostically even if the ordering physician is a specialist in that field;
-coercing elder seniors into nursing homes when their recovery is too slow;
-and the list goes on…
These utilization doctors and nurses use slanted economic criteria developed by their groups only looking at medical computer data. Rarely are they face-to-face assessing patient symptoms, examining their body, or understanding psychosocial factors.
There might be a shortage of medical professionals, but it is exacerbated as profiteers use more and more trained doctors and nurses to provide paperwork care, not patient care.
Gene Uzawa Dorio, M.D.
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