To think the BMA have misjudged with another doctor's strike? Thread 2

[Locutus2000]

Rolling this over as people still seem to have something to say but no new poll.

Original post

AIBU to think the BMA have misjudged with another doctor's strike?

Last year they got more than anyone else in the NHS along with an improved deal. Nurses and other AHPs received lower rises.

BMA have just announced another 'resident' doctor strike continuing to chase pay restoration to 2008 levels.

Having just had the major win with changes to IMG prioritisation and the clamp-down on PAs it feels a bit tone-deaf and I can't see Streeting going for it.

I saw two patients in my clinic this week who'd been on the waiting list for 5 years.

Thats nothing to do with strikes.

But it actually is.
Attempts to address those waiting lists were derailed by the previous very damaging strikes

Ive only lost one list in the whole series of strikes.

The waiting lists are a separate issue caused by over decade of underfunding and underinvestment.

Fair enough but I imagine waiting out two strikes feels immensely frustrating nonetheless. It certainly isn’t helping

@poetryandwine I'm neither a mathematician nor a psychologist, but I think MHP is not easy and not just a probability problem.

You will be familiar with this from Gill 2009, "The Monty Hall Problem is not a Probability Puzzle (It’s a challenge in mathematical modelling)."

"The Monty Hall Problem offers much more to the student than a mindless exercise in conditional probability. It also offers a challenging exercise in mathematical modelling. I notice three important lessons. (1) The more you assume, the more you can conclude, but the more limited are your conclusions. The honest answer is not one mathematical solution but a range of solutions. (2) Whether you are a subjectivist or a frequentist affects the ease with which you might make probabilistic assumptions but simultaneously affects the meaning of the conclusions. (3). Think out of the box. Vos Savant asks for an action, not for a probability. The player has two decision moments during the show, not one."

But at no point does Gill discuss heuristics, regret theory, and equiprobability bias, which explain why subjects make the wrong choice.

Equiprobability bias increases with formal statistical education. Isn't MHP included in maths teaching now, to avoid this and because it is distinct from probability?

For equiprobability bias see Saenen, L., Heyvaert, M., Van Dooren, W., & Onghena, P. (2015). Inhibitory control in a notorious brain teaser: The Monty Hall dilemma. ZDM Mathematics Education, 47(5), 837 848. doi:10.1007/s11858-015-0667-6

Again, I would be grateful if you could explain the probability approach to the Thog Problem because I don't get it.

To take your points in reverse order, I also did not understand how probability theory relates to the thog problem.

I had also asked @C8H10N4O2 to explain this.

As always, thank you for the reference; I am not familiar with Gill’s paper (yet). I am sure it will be stimulating but perhaps also annoying? The Law of Large Numbers does ensure that there is one answer and that you have a 2/3 chance of winning if you switch and a 1/3 chance of winning if you don’t. Do 100 or 1000 online simulations - the more, the better - to see a very close approximation to this fact.

This doesn’t negate the idea that you can gain other sorts of information from the problem, I suppose. We shall see. I am surprised that equiprobabilty bias increases with education in statistics - at what level? I am mostly familiar with high school Maths only insofar as it prepares for the study of my discipline. I don’t know much about the Statistics curriculum.

I am not a statistician (or a psychologist)either. In my home country those in my field did quite a lot of UG maths including a semester of upper level Probability at a level I have only seen available to Maths students in the UK. I think the MHP was an exercise for us.

According to the news this morning, they only have about 30% support. Most think that they got a huge rise last year, and now need to just get on with that for a while.

Or is Gill trying to assign weighted probabilities to people’s states of mond, or condition on mental state, past history, or something of the sort? I am sure one can construct ever more elaborate MHPs by imposing extra conditions and assigning probabilities.

Could be the germ of a decent UG or, if suitably generalised, MSc project joint im Psychology and Maths I suppose. Anyway I need to read Gill but unlike your other references this one does not have me feeling eager! Hope I am wrong

New Labour were very generous to the medical profession, including the now infamous GP contract, and 2007/2008 was the peak for pay, terms and conditions just before the Global Financial Crisis wrecked the economy.

Ah, that makes sense. I don't understand why this isn't being questioned more in the media. I remember the GP contract. A GP friend of mine said this was their starting offer and not what they were expecting to get.

So, @Marchesman , I found a paper by Gill with a very similar title to the one above at arxiv.org and it is accurate to say I skimmed it.

The most striking result to me is that under reasonable hypotheses the unconditional and conditional probabilities of success upon switching are both 2/3. The intermediate proposition only gives a lower bound on probability.

The conceptualisation in terms of game theory is also interesting.

But honestly, the syntactical analysis of a fairly routine problem like the MHP is not one of my strengths. Your other reference, about the role of human bias, may be more interesting.

PS @Marchesman Saenen et al does look more interesting, thank you. For another day at this point, however

What has this got to do with resident doctors striking?

Threads always go off in varied directions.

The BMA have lost the support of the majority of the general public. They come across a militant trouble makers and so out of touch with the current state of our country's finances. The misery these strikes are causing to people who are getting nowhere near the proposed drs pay award is sickening.

As well as their demands for more pay, the BMA tell us that junior doctors are expert clinicians. Examination data show that this is untrue. Graduates with lower prior attainment or from newer medical schools or without intensive scientific teaching perform poorly in postgraduate exams which test recall, judgement, and the ability to make correct diagnoses.

The cost of medical negligence claims has risen nearly every year, to nearly £3 billon p.a.; A/E generates more claims than other specialities where junior registrars are mostly responsible.

The discussion was about the role of attention and effort in diagnostic processes.

Thank you, @Marchesman . I suppose even the role of bias in the MHP is relevant to this.

Facts. Not conjecture or elitism. Over half F2 doctors unemployed from next week. And this doesn't include the thousands who are going abroad as no jobs here for them. Whilst waiting lists are 7 million +. What a waste of tax payers cash.

https://www.bma.org.uk/bma-media-centre/bma-seeks-deal-on-doctor-unemployment-as-survey-reveals-half-of-resident-doctors-finishing-foundation-training-have-no-job-to-go-to-next-month

I mean, over half of the F2s who responded to this very time limited survey mumsneedwine.

So, 'fact' up to a point, Lord Copper (no apologies for another Waugh reference).

Melissa Ryan has pretty much shot up what credibility the BMA had anyway and so I'm underwhelmed, frankly.

https://www.bma.org.uk/bma-media-centre/bma-seeks-deal-on-doctor-unemployment-as-survey-reveals-half-of-resident-doctors-finishing-foundation-training-have-no-job-to-go-to-next-month

I agree with @Sevillian : we need to keep in mind that this is a self selected sample.

Although the reasons for the unemployment are unclear and probably complex, this is an important issue for the doctors, taxpayers and government.

Too bad the BMA did not choose to prioritise it earlier.

547 F2s answered 'no job'.

BMA is probably bigging up their limited survey now in order to back peddle on pay and not look quite as bad as they currently do.

mumsneedwine there's a useful comparison to be made between the way you inflate numbers with such ease and Hungary's hyper inflation after WWII. Difficult to detect any material difference.

I completely agree that this should be the ultimate priority for any negotiations. Not a 29% pay rise which will probably lead to even less training posts/ jobs.

https://blackwaterlaw.co.uk/7-stats-latest-nhs-resolution-figures/

thats slightly unfair - a&e/emergency medicine is 13.3% of claims, the next is obstetrics with 11.6%.