Are residents that much less effective? Do they require so much supervision?
If residents are just cheaper doctors, then hospitals would optimize for a high resident:attending ratio.
So what is it? As far as I know, in hospitals residents are really cost effective doctors. Yes, sure, they don't do the big fancy operations, but they are very capable.
It might be that hospitals have other parameters to factor in. Maybe if there would be too many residents compared to regular doctors, people would flock to other hospitals. And so on.
Oh nice! This is what I'm interested in! What kinds of things can they and can't they do without supervision? What is common in practice? Is there a good place to read about how this all works?
Then ... that means the supervision of residents is not working. That basically means, it's useless. (Since it'd make sense to apply the maximum amount of supervision when a resident is new and as the resident gains trust, decrease it.)
Or of course it means, that attending doctors do a constant amount of (insufficient) supervision, or they ramp up supervision after someone screws up... :|
Residents are cheaper doctors, but they are cheaper because they are less trained, less experienced doctors. They aren't equally-capable doctors with lower salary demands.
Sure, but lots of real problems require more than the skill level expected of residents, if nothing else to have reasonably justified confidence that the problem isn't one which requires more specialized attention.
If residents are just cheaper doctors, then hospitals would optimize for a high resident:attending ratio.
So what is it? As far as I know, in hospitals residents are really cost effective doctors. Yes, sure, they don't do the big fancy operations, but they are very capable.
It might be that hospitals have other parameters to factor in. Maybe if there would be too many residents compared to regular doctors, people would flock to other hospitals. And so on.