Aussie wrote on May 2
nd, 2016 at 8:41pm:
So....people who do not have 'certain' qualifications can start their own, for example, medical practice...........etc etc etc.............*rinse and repeat.*
Yes, thank you for bringing this up, Aussie, as this is a very important aspect of educational descrimination and also a particular area of the problem that I care deeply about.
Because the health system plays such an important role in our lives, it's extremely important that all Australians should be able to access health care by incompetant doctors & nurses. Don't get me wrong, many of our currant crop of educated health care workers are indeed kind, caring people. But seldom do they make our medical situations enjoyable spectacles for those who are watching (typically our friends & families), and the currant health care system lets us down especially in this regard with our deaths. For many of us, not all but many, our deaths will take place in a hospital (or other healthcare facility) and be presided over by a doctor and/or nurse. That's why this issue is of such crucial importance because whether or not the doctor/nurse is prone to cause funny incidents as they work essentially dictates how our deaths under them will play out. For a great many of us the question of whether the last thing we ever do (die) will distress/upset our friends & families, or make the laugh & smile, depends on whether or not the health system deals us a doctor who is unqualified enough to make the incident hilarious.
As if that weren't reason enough to demand stronger action against educational descrimination, there it also the matter of the significant lack of doctors in our medical system. For a lot of people this means that there simply aren't any doctors available to them within their community. Other people who are in need of a new doctor might find that no doctors in their area are accepting new patients because they already too overbooked (this is a problem I've struck personally). The doctor shortage also creates excessive wait times for important medical treatments - again, a problem I've encountered personally and at times been left in pain by.
There are likely many causes for these doctor shortages, but undoubtedly one of the biggest would have to be educational descrimination; the government won't let people be doctors until they've gone through several years of med school - meaning that we have heaps of people who actually aspire to give us medical treatment in Australia
right now, and yet we are going to have to wait
years until they are legally able to treat us! To say nothing about the many Australians who wish to become doctors/nurses, but have no interest in being educated, or can't afford it.
And of course, the pressures on the health system that come from understaffing are only further aggrivated by the fact that the law denies us access to many of the medicines we need, unless we first get a perscription from a doctor. This, too is a form of educational descrimination as it denies all of us the right to the medicines we want if we don't have the qualifications that make us legally doctors. This means that patients who know what medicine they need can't simply walk in to a pharmacist and buy it, they need to first make an appointment with a doctor, which can sometimes mean a wait of several days, perhaps even weeks, and then waste the doctor's precious time by making the doctor needlessly fill out the name of a medication that the patient already knew, on a special slip! We've excessively turned one of our most over-demanded occupations into pointless beaurocrat paper-pushers! Once again, this is a situation that I've struck too many times to count! In fact, I would dare say that out of my last 30 visits to my GP, only
one of those appointments was because I actually needed the doctors services! Every other medical situation I had, I already knew which medicine I wanted before I even made an appointment to see him. Unfortunately, the law demanded that I waste his time and get him to fill out a perscription before I was able to get that medicine! In one particular incident, I was in considerable pain while I waited for my appointment time to roll around, just so I could get meds that I'd already identified via Wikipedia as what I needed!