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by mschuster91 745 days ago
It's a necessity, a side-product of not having anywhere near enough nurses, assistant staff and doctors in hospitals. They're juggling alarms constantly (which have to blare in a cacophony) and speed from one patient to the next.

Ideally you'd have a 1:1 (or better!) assignment between a single patient to a single nurse in critical care, 1:3 for patients that can't move around on their own (and thus need more assistance, even if it's just helping them to eat or go to the loo), and 1:5 to 1:10 for everyone else. The sad reality is that even in Germany, you have care home staff calling in the fire department to assist because there were just three staff in a night shift, having to deal with 170 patients.

[1] https://www.morgenpost.de/berlin/article242110812/Kurioser-G...
2 comments
ler_ 745 days ago
Thank you for bringing that up, understaffing affects everything and harms patients. No set of alarms will ever replace the benefit of having enough people working.
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blackeyeblitzar 745 days ago
I don’t disagree but I’m not sure how to make the costs of healthcare work with those ratios
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mschuster91 745 days ago
Get rid of bureaucratic bullshit and you'd get > 250 billion $ a year [1]. Get rid of insurances and other middlemen and you'd get another 450 billion $ a year by going for single-payer [2]. Then, get the homeless enrolled in insurance as well - even if the government pays the premium, every single homeless person costs > 18k a year in ER visits [3], a lot of which could be prevented if these people could go to a doctor before they'd be sick enough to incur serious ER costs. And finally, get as many homeless drug addicts back into some sort of stable housing. A lot of drug usage "on the streets" is self-medication to cope with the immense stress that comes from being homeless. Yes, there will always be a certain percentage of hardcore voluntary homeless people, but that's way better manageable than the status quo.

That should be way more than enough to hire enough nurses.

[1] https://www.americanprogress.org/article/excess-administrati...

[2] https://ysph.yale.edu/news-article/yale-study-more-than-3350...

[3] https://www.newsweek.com/homeless-americans-are-costing-us-m...

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