27/12/01 

Is the Training of Women Doctors A Waste of Money?

UK GP shortage to worsen as young doctors switch to part-time work. 

UK More than half of all students taking up scarce places at medical school are women - yet, after 10 years, 60 per cent of them have given up, leaving a huge hole in the NHS. The same goes for teaching. Alice Thomson - Daily Telegraph 27/06/03

60% of women doctors will give up their 'careers' within about 10 years.

The continuing deterioration of the National Health Service despite the enormous extra sums of money being put into it by the taxpayer is largely thanks to the training of more and more women to become doctors in the place of men. 

In areas such as medicine, the requirement to give women 'equal opportunities' by demanding that medical schools try to train as many women as they do men to become doctors is leading to far worse conditions and shortfalls in the NHS - a service that is already failing the country abysmally.

The fact that so many of these women doctors will take out years from their profession in order to have children and to look after them (with some never returning) is a major drain on a system that is already unable to cope.

In theory, it sounds great to have as many women doctors working in the NHS as men. In practice, however, the consequence is that EVERYONE has to wait a good deal longer to be dealt with, and the entire service is considerably less efficient.

And with waiting lists already far too long even for urgent surgical operations, the price for this 'equality' is rather high. And it costs some people their health and some people their lives.

Most people have a great deal of sympathy with the view that women should be permitted to become doctors working for the NHS if they have the requisite abilities - even if they do log out of the system to bring up families. But there is a price to be paid! In the case of the NHS, everyone who uses it pays a price - particularly the old, the young, the weak, the vulnerable and the sick.

In fact, the most needy of all pay the price!

And these are mostly women.

Indeed, many times more women are negatively affected by an impoverished NHS than there are women doctors.

Further, of course, all of us will need medical treatment at some stage in our lives, and so all of us will suffer from the adverse effects of an NHS that is greatly diminished by the low long-term career aspirations of a relatively small number of women.

Furthermore, the training of doctors is a very expensive business that stretches well beyond the five years that students spend at medical school. And with 60% of women doctors giving up their careers within ten years, the training of women to become doctors is largely a waste of taxpayers' money.

Moreover, the country loses the potential talents of all those young men who would have embarked upon long-term careers in medicine were it not for the fact that women were taking up the places at medical schools.

In addition, it is worth pointing out that - as with all the major professions - experience is just about everything. And so when women doctors in the NHS give up their careers after a few years of work, the country is denied the services of men doctors who would actually have had the same period of experience.

And who would then have gone on to get even more experience!

In other words, these future highly-experienced doctors are lost forever.

In summary, the training of women to become doctors significantly degrades the health system. It harms the most needy of people the most. It negatively impacts on all of us. It is a waste of taxpayers' money. And it persistently deprives the country of a large number of highly experienced doctors.

But that's feminism for you!

As in so many other areas, it has a huge cost.

And why do we inflict this huge cost upon the nation?

We do this so that a few thousand women can benefit from having a career in medicine, with most of them choosing to abandon it for something more to their liking.

What is the solution? Do we stop women from becoming doctors by giving all the limited number of places at medical schools to men?

Well, the purpose of this article was not to provide a particular solution to this problem, but to point out that this is yet another area where feminism extracts a very large price from just about everyone for the benefit of a few women. This needs to be pointed out rather than swept under the carpet.

Furthermore, this issue also highlights the impossibility of achieving the 'gender equity' so often loudly espoused by current-day feminists with rarely a thought to what it might actually mean. The phrase 'gender equity' is virtually meaningless.

For example, how, exactly, does one achieve 'gender equity' with regard to the training of women doctors?

Do we force women doctors to stay at their posts so that the gender balance of highly-experienced doctors remains the same throughout the decades? 

Would this achieve 'gender equity'?

No. It would not. And there would be permanent public outrage orchestrated by the feminists on the grounds of sex-discrimination.

Do we train twice as many women doctors as men in medical schools to allow for the fact that half of the women will drop out - on the grounds that unless we do this women will not have access to the same number of experienced women doctors as men have to men doctors?

Would this achieve 'gender equity'?

No. It would not. Such a solution would clearly discriminate very heavily against talented young men who wanted to go to medical school. And it would result in the most enormous waste of taxpayers money and a diversion of scarce educational resources toward the very group of people - women - most likely to squander them, with the negative consequences being worst for the most sick and the most vulnerable people in our society. 

So. What 'equitable' solutions to this particular problem of women doctors choosing to quit the medical profession would 'gender equity' feminists actually propose?

And what do we do about the feminist mullahs and their media lackeys who continue stirring up hatred toward men by blaming them for the fact that relatively few women eventually reach high office in the world of medicine despite the case being that it is clearly the women themselves who, statistically speaking, have little interest in achieving high office?

And what would be so laughable about this sort of situation - were its consequences not so awful - is this. 

Because women doctors drop like flies out of the profession, there ends up being a shortage of doctors. This raises the value of doctors and, hence, their incomes, and so the average pay for men rises (as does their attractiveness to non-earning wives) while that of women, relatively, falls.

Feminism is a very damaging and destructive ideology. It is always concerned solely with the welfare of a few women - in this particular case, those who have whims about being doctors - to the detriment of everyone else. Further, its proponents - the feminists - then foist hatred throughout the nation by vociferously blaming men for the failures of these very same women to reach statistical parity in high positions!

Indeed, the only solution that can ever eventually satisfy the feminists is for men and women to be forced into being statistically the same in just about every conceivable way. Anything less and they will continue to cry 'discrimination' and constantly seek to portray themselves as perpetual victims and men as perpetual oppressors.

Forty years ago, those who interviewed students who wanted places at medical schools used to grill them very aggressively with questions designed to find out how likely they were to stick with the profession once they had qualified. They did not want to expend their scarce resources training people who were going to end up wasting them.

Nowadays, however, no expense is spared in order to pander to the selfish desires of a few women, no matter how detrimental these desires may be to the lives of everyone else.

...

UK Crippling Africa's Healthcare Many doctors overseas apply to work in the UK each year The UK is crippling sub-Saharan Africa's healthcare system by poaching its staff, UK doctors have warned.

Yep; we have to poach doctors from impoverished parts of the world because 60% of our own women doctors give up their jobs within ten years, with a further huge percentage only willing to work part time.

Despite the appalling problems that this causes to our health service and, as indicated above, also to those impoverished people who live in countries that cannot afford to lose their doctors to us, we, in the UK, will continue to waste our precious medical resources training annually a few thousand women who wish to play around at being doctors for a short number of years.

And we will continue to do this because nothing, absolutely nothing, must stand in the way of even a small number of women doing whatever they want to do, no matter how much is the cost to everyone else.

The scale of the influx of foreign doctors and nurses into the British health service has been disclosed as figures show nearly 190,000 doctors and nurses have come to the country from outside the EU in just eight years.

Bleeding Africa Dry

...

(Also see AH's A Permanent Gender War?)

10/10/98

Doctor gets £500k for needle prick

BBC News

The doctor developed growing anxieties about needles, blood and Aids

A junior doctor has received almost half a million pounds in compensation after accidentally pricking herself with a needle.

June Kelly: "The BMA says the size of the damages reflects a lifetimes's loss of earnings" The doctor, a house officer in a London hospital, had not picked up any infection from the injury, but she developed a phobia about needles and is now unable to work.

The woman pricked herself on a needle left on a drugs trolley at Charing Cross Hospital, west London, in December 1992.

Anxieties

The doctor, who had been qualified for about a year, developed growing anxieties about needles, blood and Aids. She struggled to work before signing off sick almost two years later.

BMA News Review magazine, to whom the unidentified doctor spoke, reports that she is unable to even leave the house and is unlikely to work as a doctor again.

The woman sought legal help from the British Medical Association, and in September two health authorities involved - North Thames, and Ealing Hammersmith and Hounslow - agreed to pay her £465,000 damages plus legal costs.

Inadequate training

The doctor, who did not want to be identified, told the magazine that she felt there had been inadequate training on what to do after such a needle injury. No occupational health support had been offered, she said.

Her work had suffered greatly: "After the incident, I kept worrying about what I could have caught.

"I began to avoid high-risk patients. I hid in the loo so someone else would deal with them. I avoided stitching wounds and pretended blood tests I had never taken had got lost.

"I thought I had been lucky once but it could easily happen again. I could not trust my colleagues to dispose of their sharps safely."

The BMA said the case illustrated how vital it was for junior doctors to be properly trained in disposing of needles and reporting accidents.

It said the doctor had sought legal representation after reading in the News Review of a doctor who had sat on a needle and won damages - with the help of the BMA.

The doctors' association said: "This is a good result for the doctor, whose life and career have been desperately ruined by the incident."

But the head of the Patients' Association, Claire Rayner, said the damages appeared "much too high".

She said: "I feel very sorry for this doctor, and she should certainly have received more support after the accident.

"But all doctors and nurses have to accept there is some sort of risk in their work. How many nurses, front-line staff, get black eyes or other injuries and never dream of suing?

"This is money the NHS cannot afford."

Woman Shot A 22-year-old pregnant woman has been shot dead in south-west London.

Well. You never know: One day soon women might actually wake up to the fact that supporting feminism is simply going to increase the amount of violence that is going to come their way - on many fronts.

Governments, of course, will love this - but women, most decidedly, will not.

An example:

I was conversing with a teacher friend of mine the other day, and he stated that since the departure of three male colleagues from his school, the levels of violence and bad behaviour of the children had increased significantly. Their female replacements were useless when it came to dealing with the poor behaviours of the children - particularly with regard to the boys.

Well, I presume that these boys will now more likely turn into disruptive, anti-social adults, and that, as such, thousands of women will, in one way or another, be affected some day by their unwholesome presence in their communities.

And yet these thousands of women will still mostly argue that women are just as good as men when it comes to bringing up the boys. 

In other words, these women would rather that three female teachers were given their 'job opportunities' than live in safer neighbourhoods.

Goodness. They are stupid. I think that their greed and their self-centredness must have overcome their ability to think rationally.

And, of course, you can say the same sort of thing when talking about just about all areas of employment wherein women are being unfairly 'advantaged' over men these days. A few women get to gain, but everyone else pays some kind of price.

"Oh, never mind that our battalion was wiped out. At least we had a woman officer!"

"Oh, never mind that my pension money has gone down the tubes. At least the company had a woman investment manager!"

"Oh, never mind that my child died on the operating table. At least the surgeon was a woman!"

And, in this particular case, one young pregnant woman was shot for no justifiable reason at all.

Still. Never mind, eh? At least the murderer probably had mostly feminist-indoctrinated women for his teachers.

And this is a good thing for women, isn't it?

22/2/02

Part-Time Women GPs Hinder Plan to Expand NHS 

Nigel Hawkes

The Times

THE increase in women doctors is a timebomb for the NHS as their desire to work part-time means that the Government could meet its target of 2,000 extra GPs by 2004 yet still see a fall in hours worked, a new survey shows. The British Medical Association has repeatedly given warning that part-timers would blow a hole in the Government’s NHS Plan, as more than half of all new GPs are women.

The survey, published in British Medical Journal, shows just how serious the problem is likely to be.

Isobel Bowler, an independent health service researcher, and Neil Jackson, Dean of Postgraduate General Practice Eduction in London, issued questionnaires to all 470 GP registrars — GPs in training — in southeast England. They represented a third of all registrars in England.

Almost 80 per cent returned the questionnaires. The results showed that 60 per cent of women GPs do not plan to work full-time.

Only 30 per cent of them said that they planned to work full-time, compared with 75 per cent of the men.

Since the majority of young GPs are women, this will make a big difference to the total number needed to meet the NHS Plan targets.

The authors of the research conclude that the Government’s promise of 550 new training posts in order to achieve 2,000 new GPs will not be enough. “Qualified doctors currently in practice should be retained and encouraged to participate more in the workforce,” they say.

The BMA says that the research backs up its own survey carried out last year, to which all GPs were asked to respond. “When we analysed it by age we found that younger GPs all intended to work part-time,” a BMA spokeswoman said.

“More than three quarters of GPs under 30 are women, and even if they do no more than take their entitlement to maternity leave it will have a considerable effect.”

The Department of Health’s own workforce figures show that last year the number of GPs in England, measured by the hours they will work, rose by just 18 to 25,938.

Measuring numbers in this way is more accurate than a simple head-count, as it takes into account those who work part-time. In Wales, the number had actually fallen, by one.

Doctors’ leaders condemned the increases as woefully inadequate but the Department of Health says that the true increase is 310, if trainees and those working under different contracts are included.

The total headcount, the figure that the department emphasised, has risen to 30,685 in England.

Training medical students could also be a problem in future because of the decline in the number of doctors who work in medical schools, a second paper in British Medical Journal says.

Professor Paul Steart of the University of Birmingham says that academic medicine is great difficulty, with more than 10 per cent of posts unfilled. He says that the uncertain career structure for academics, combined with lower salary prospects because of a lack of opportunities for private work, are two reasons.

Clinical research is also under threat, with the number of academics involved in it falling by 12 per cent between 1996 and 2001.

THE growing number of female doctors is causing a staffing crisis as they are avoiding jobs that involve weekend work and long hours, claim consultants.There is also a shortage of hospital doctors because women are looking for part-time hours and opting for general practice because the hours are more family-friendly. 

Figures from the Irish Medical Council show women (2,343) outnumber men (2,248) as doctors aged 20-35 for the first time. 

Dr Roisín Healy, A&E consultant at Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin, Dublin, said the feminisation of medicine was damaging. 

“I do think the status of the profession goes down the more feminised it becomes, that’s a sociological given. Men still have more clout - the more masculised a profession, the more it gets, for example, in terms of attracting funding for research.” 

Dr Chris Luke, director of postgraduate medicine at Cork University Hospital (CUH), warned the feminisation of medicine had significant implications. 

“We have grave difficulties staffing A&E departments around the country basically because the discipline is out of hours. 

“It seems to be a fact that women are making different career choices to their predecessors and by and large are opting for specialities that are not out of hours, or they are looking for part-time work.”

Dr Luke said he was seeing shortages in training for surgery, A&E and anaesthesia - which all have high on-call rates - partly attributable to women opting out of out-of-hours work. 

He said implementing the Fottrell report was the only way to end the growing gender imbalance because it would replace the Leaving Certificate - where girls traditionally score higher - as the only assessment tool for entry to medical school. 

However, Dr Mary Gray, a Limerick-based GP who has reviewed studies of women in medicine, said the Leaving Certificate is a fair system. 

“There is no outside influence. I wouldn’t support any system that wasn’t based purely on merit. If you were to introduce a discriminatory system, making it easier for men, you are then discriminating against women.”

...

Ah yes. One must not discriminate against a few thousand women's career aspirations even though EVERYBODY ELSE IN THE COUNTRY - especially the weak, the sick, the old and the vulnerable - has to pay a SIGNIFICANT price - with their health.

UK Patients who have major operations on the National Health Service are four times more likely to die than Americans undergoing such surgery, according to a new study. The difference in mortality rates was blamed on long NHS waiting lists, a shortage of specialists and competition for intensive care beds. 07/09/03

UK More than nine out of 10 of the girls believe it should be up to their husbands to provide for them. 20/10/03

"According to a survey of 5,000-plus teenage girls, their main ambition is to complete university then return to the homestead - whether their partners like it or not."