So you are saying our hospital beds and staff are fixed immutable resources and that in an emergency all other variables must be sacrificed in order to not exceed those fixed immutable resources?
> So you are saying our hospital beds and staff are fixed immutable resources and that in an emergency all other variables must be sacrificed in order to not exceed those fixed immutable resources?
Absolutely. Steve the UberEats delivery driver can be moved into the ICU, putting folks on ventilators and providing critical care in a week or so, right?
And Gustavo, the busboy can be out providing EMT services in just a few days, right?
A doctor requires 8+ years of post-secondary education, in addition to several years of on-the-job training.
An RN requires at least 6+ years of post-secondary education, plus several years of on-the-job training. LPNs even longer.
So, yes. In the short term (~6-18 months), staff are most certainly fairly fixed resources.
As for hospital beds, those are limited to the square footage available for them. Sure, temporary hospital wards can be constructed and put in place fairly quickly, but unless Steve and Gustavo are staffing them, you still have a big problem.
This is just throwing your arms up in the air and saying it's unsolvable.
I don't give up. Make a temporary hospital with ip web cams pointed at all the vitals. Build a quick and dirty dashboard that lets doctors/nurses monitor dozens of patients at once instead of having to physically walk around everywhere. If engineers can get more done with less using automation, medical professionals can do it too.
In an emergency situation, you make do. Train temporary workers to man the temporary hospitals. Teach them how to know when to defer to a medical professional. You can hire a bunch of boy scouts to do the repetitive stuff, and have them call in a real doctor or nurse if symptom progression isn't matching their training.
> Train temporary workers to man the temporary hospitals. Teach them how to know when to defer to a medical professional.
Normal hospitals are already staffed at pretty close to the maximum rate of less qualified to more expert staff for their caseload, and the easy caseload that requires less expert share of time is pushed out of hospitals entirely by the crisis. Surging additional minimally trained staff doesn't help anything.
Ok, then use technology to help the current staff do more. How many inefficiencies are preventing nurses and doctors from servicing more patients? Build a dashboard with the vitals of dozens of covid patients that a single qualified nurse can monitor instead of making a half dozen nurses all walk around to all the different beds and manually check everything
> How many inefficiencies are preventing nurses and doctors from servicing more patients? Build a dashboard with the vitals of dozens of covid patients that a single qualified nurse can monitor instead of making a half dozen nurses all walk around to all the different beds and manually check everything
I believe ICU nursing stations already use such dashboards routinely.
If they didn't, developing and testing new software to a level where it was reliable enough for such use without being checked up around, and training staff and adapting processes for it, would not be a quick process and, perhaps more importantly, would take staff time of clinical staff to participate in consultation and validation instead of clinical duties while it progressed.