My first dislike - anon Posted: Aug 26th, 2016 - 10:56 pm In Reply to: Our overseas counterparts - suffer too
I do think the sentiment is very kind, and that goes a long way in my book. But ultimately I disagree.
I just cannot look at it in terms of having compassion for ILPs who may be slightly underpaid at a job they are not all that good at as they are not native English speakers, but pays the bills (though relative to cost of living, their situation does not seem nearly as dire as ours). Is it their fault the MTSOs are off-shoring to them? Of course not!
But it should not be happening. Period. Even if I were not an MT, as a patient, if I knew the poor quality work coming from the off-shoring of medical documentation, I would be horrified.
Personally, I think each and every US citizen should by now be asking how their medical records are documented and where.
Talk about globalization and helping other economies all you want, at some point it MUST come back to: How do individual countries support globalization while first and foremost remaining committed to the welfare of its own loyal citizens, on its own soil?
We are a kind nation overall, and we worry about world poverty, and well we should, but we have poverty right here too, and many of us do worry about it and sometimes we even live in the midst of it. Dress it up and call it whatever fancy name these corporations want to give it, but it all comes down to the desire on the part of major corporations to make a profit at any cost.
We support our troops. Why do we not support our hard-working citizens who are similarly loyal...the very citizens who make up the country our troops are working so hard to defend?
I am not going to argue sending factory work to China or India or the Philippines, though I wholeheartedly believe it was wrong to do so. Tell me we have supported the global economy, and I will show you cities desecrated by the loss of factories and industries that once supported hard-working American families.
But medical transcription? Or editing, for the sake of argument. In the US. Take the most difficult language there is, add to it the complexity of medical terminology, the quirky idioms and slang, and a healthy dose of physician accents from the melting pot of nationalities that is the U.S, combined with the high standard of perfection we expect from anyone directly involved in patient care in this country (how many people in this country feel it's reasonable to expect critical errors to be made on a regular basis when they seek medical care?).... take that away from the highly skilled American English-speaking professionals who trained for years to do this work accurately and were paid accordingly.... take all that away and hand it to ILPs who will never grasp the English, not to mention English medical language, in the same way.
Hand it over like it has no more value than the making of a pair of shoes in a factory?
Hand over something that directly can impact patient care in a significant, life-or-death manner. In such a way that your highly-trained US professionals can no longer afford to support themselves doing this work, much less thrive.
Hand that over to the ILPs, and tell me it's sad they aren't paid as well?
No. It is a travesty that any of this should have happened, but in particular it is a travesty that it should happen in the realm of health care documentation, where we are, rightly, held to extremely high accuracy standards, where for years it was enforced to us constantly that the slightest error is risky, but that a critical error can be dangerous to the very life of a patient.
How on earth did anyone EVER manage to convince ANYONE anywhere that this would lead to anything but disaster?
Maybe no one is concerned that airplane parts are being made in China, or that even the IRS has sent its customer service departments overseas. But medical care is one area that MUST remain on US soil. At the very least, it must remain the domain of native English speakers. Off-shore to England or Canada, if you must, but the job is about language and accuracy and patient care...it is challenging enough for the native born, and it absolutely must not go to ESLs, it just cannot.
Absolutely, the Indians can do Indian transcription, and the Filipinos their own.
What we need to do is bring back American medical transcription before anyone else gets seriously hurt. And what ILP wants to carry the burden of that? Whether it is against an American or an Indian or a Filipino, who wants the burden of having harmed a patient doing a job they just weren't qualified to do?
I am not sad for the ILPs. I am sad for us.
And maybe I am sad for all of us, of any nationality, who actually can see past race and ethnicity, who don't hate Americans on principle, or Indians, or any other ethnicity...who don't see all of this through dollar signs...any of us with a conscience who can see the disaster that is happening in American patient care, and feel completely helpless to do a damn thing about it.
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