You need more doctors tomorrow? How long does it take to train a doctor?

If you need more doctors tomorrow, how long does it take to train a doctor? Welcome to today's episode, my name is Tom Rolley for systemio.dev.

Medicine at least here in Australia has a bizarre feature.

And that is that because a lot of the funding comes from the government, it's not quite specially socialized medicine, but there's a lot of insurance money that gets paid from the government.

One of the peculiar features is that medical surgeries here do not need to know much about regular business services or requirements, things like marketing, ads or sales.

In fact, they're actually largely prevented from advertising.

And sales is generally not a requirement because there's essentially an endless supply of people who can pay because the government pays.

But lately, we've been having a few more difficulties.

The reasons for this are quite varied but include Coronavirus, certainly, this has been very challenging for the medical profession, at least at the Family Medicine level at the GP level.

In Australia, it's called general practice or GP, you may know it as family medicine.

And for various reasons, the cost of practices have gone up, the number of available doctors has gone down as some have finished up for some have found it too difficult.

Some have found the general requirements to be adopted to be too difficult, and they've stopped working or they're working fewer hours.

This is a very interesting thing for the patients to experience because we are not even close to peak medical.

And at least here in Australia, we are seeing petrol prices skyrocket.

I hear in the States, they're going up a lot as well, you guys are coming off a low base.

And so it's not perhaps so bad.

I think I just paid $2.

30 A leader for diesel.

So that equates to I believe something like $9.

20 ensure that Aussie dollars for a gallon is 924 a gallon.

A here over in New Zealand was $3.

The UK, it's expensive.

And you might be thinking cheap, this is expensive.

This is going to cause some challenges, this is going to spread through the cost of everything that requires transport.

And everything's going to go up.

But I want to let you know that there's a demographic problem that exists in virtually all of the Western cultures, the Western countries, and this may make peak petrol or whatever petrol maybe petrels got a lot more go like gas is going to be way up from here.

But this experience of a requirement for medicine as the baby boomers begin to age right now, the first baby boomers are 76.

How do I know my father's born in 1946 76? Right now, he's the first the baby boomers, and there's this big cohort of people.

But remember what I said that we said that we losing doctors, the doctors for whatever reasons are working less or look, frankly, the systems in medicine are at best, average and at worst.

Horrendous, like just a weird catch.

22 is very difficult to stay on top of the amount of information that's coming at you.

Australia has made the GPS the centre of the interaction between the patient and the rest of the medical system.

But they also kind of don't invest much in general practice give conflicting information.

And whenever there's a crisis, the Prime Minister's solution has largely been to say we'll go and talk to your general practitioner this has been very difficult.

So what's going to happen? What's going to happen? What's going to happen is that it is going to be very difficult to get appointments with doctors.

I don't know how it is in other countries, but at least in Australia, it looks to me that the medical students know not to go into GP they're like why would you do that job Ed is so difficult It is very confusing, it is relatively unsupported and pays really badly.

Why wouldn't you go into one of the specialties and they know this, they can see this, they go and have a GP term and go to this job, this job you guys are doing what is this job? There's no API, there's nothing going on to make it helpful.

There's not, there's barely instructions to help.

And there is an overwhelming amount of information of data coming inpatient demands patients having full access to the internet, with questions that make, I suppose some sense if you've typed something into Google, but really do not align with how doctors think in terms of working out what's wrong, and then once you know that, then working out what to do the working out what to do once you know what's wrong is generally available.

But the first bit, is that is not a skill set that can just be learned over a weekend.

There's a trial going on up in Queensland, where they're getting pharmacists to do doctors, jobs, but it's a big ask to learn how to think like a doctor.

And they're doing it over like three weeks or four weeks or something.

It's like, Do you realize how long it takes to become a general practitioner.

And that's the shorter program compared to a specialist.

Like at minimum, I know me, three years of science, four years of med school, two years of General Hospital work, then three years of the general practice training.

And then it still takes like another five years to actually get like, Okay, I think I think I kind of know what I'm doing here.

This is this game, I get this game, I know what's going on and know how to diagnose know how to treat.

So you're looking at seven, plus two, that's nine plus three, that's 1212, to get a doctor out the door, and another five for them to really be good at their job.

17 years.

The problem that we really face right now, at least in medicine, is that in 17 years, even if we quadrupled the number of medical students today, you are not going to see them in time.

So we are going to face a significant crisis in healthcare.

And this may be solved by importing doctors from the third world and saying, Hey, India, and Cuba and many other cultures that have great doctors bringing them in and getting them to work.

And that's fine.

That's totally cool.

But we've got to be thinking about these problems.

How are we going to deal with when there's way too much demand and not enough supply that is going to drive prices through the roof.

So expect to pay high prices for medicine in four or five years.

Just as we are seeing with petrol right now.

Just as we're seeing with timber, just as we're seeing with everything where demand has gone up and supply has gone down.

These two will happen with medicine.

It's just we haven't hit peak medicine yet.

But it is coming.

The demographics do not lie.

The demographics do not lie.

And now we have a significant problem.

The significant problem is that He now takes longer to train a doctor, than the timeframe available that they're required in it not so good.

Not so good.

So my thoughts, keep your private investment you're in private insurance for medicine, this could come in extreme value.

This could be of extreme value.

Because it's just not going to be able to be sold on the basis of a system.

If it takes 12 years to train a doctor and you require doctors in six, you got a problem, you got a big problem.

This Systems Thinking is very helpful in your business.

Because if you know how long your systems take, then you can have a lot enough time for the work to get done.

If you have a four-hour system and you're allowing two hours to do it, then your team members will run behind or the system will not get executed.

Or you're going to end up with a backlog that is very difficult.

Just like in this healthcare situation.

You need to know how long your systems take to execute so you can plan appropriately and get your team assigned in their calendars for that work to be done.

My hope is that systems will help us grow Thankfully, if we can see a two to three times increase in productivity and a 10 times decrease in errors, check out this guy told us that in medicine that 40% of consults have an error in them on the medical front 40% How many systems do we use nominee, that's why I'm passionate about systems.

We are going to need them.

We're going to need doctors to be more functional, more effective, more efficient, and most of all, make fewer errors.

The only way we're going to do that is through systems.

Alright, that's all I got for you today.

Hope you're having an awesome day.

Make sure you keep your private insurance up and look forward to seeing the next episode.

As we continue this journey into the power of systems to create results.

See you then.