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The hospital strain point gets made a lot but I have one problem with this. Its been two years: have hospitals or the healthcare industry as a whole made an hon

by RONROC 5y ago

The hospital strain point gets made a lot but I have one problem with this. Its been two years: have hospitals or the healthcare industry as a whole made an honest effort at upping the capacity in their facilities? Why would the healthcare system of the alleged preeminent nation on planet Earth not have capacity for its citizens past a certain threshold? Many cities have older hospitals that have yet to match the population increase. If so, why is that? And should someone do something about it? Edited, to add one more question: if they shouldn’t, why not?

toomuchtodo 5y ago
You can’t make API calls to instantiate nurses and doctors, nor can you order them from Amazon. These are pipelines that take years to get folks through. If your question is, “Is the US healthcare system capacity not elastic?”, the answer is, unequivocally, no, no it is not. So get your vaccine(s) and don’t be an unnecessary burden on your fellow human, whether that’s someone who needs healthcare or someone who provides it.
- upsidesinclude 5y ago
  Hahha, uh, that's rich. Elasticity certainly could be improved by allowing nurses to return to work (those that have been terminated). OR! By increasing wages commensurate with workloads, instead of offering contract nurses 2-3x the normal rate. Your comment is shallow and belies the fact you haven't considered the problem at all, at least not honestly. You have drawn a conclusion because it sounds simple and easy and want to shame people into compliance. It's a tired tactic of late. The standard of care (that's a legal thingy, look it up) for people arriving to hospitals with mild SarsCov2 infection is to be sent HOME until symptoms worsen. This hasn't been altered as far as I can find. No treatment, zero prophylaxis. If you are interested in why hospitals look the way they do, scratch a bit deeper & and don't come parrot the propaganda we've been choking on for two years.
- RONROC 5y ago
  I hear you man. I’m the first person to excoriate bullshit engineer speak, but alas, I am not a CS major. So yes, I agree, API calls will not magically conjure up more healthcare NPCs. Fine. My question has nothing to do with the elasticity of the healthcare system which obviously has its own hosts of issues and which we won’t get into here. But if you’d rather pivot to that then the spirit of my response still has play: why hasn’t the healthcare industry optimized the incentives for healthcare workers to take on this Sisyphean task? Can you please point to some instances of hospital boards increasing pay, benefits, etc. that could offset the risk for these workers? I guess my major point here is that your highly rational civic minded approach to the crux of the issue here is disjointed: on one hand you lament the ineffectiveness of the healthcare system and in the same breath take a defeatist approach to it as if nothing can be done internally to alleviate the toll the virus is taking on it. And the sad reality is: it’s the same old shit, everyone wants to praise the heroes (Tiktok nurses) and yet, here we are, two years later, with the same dysfunctional system that got us here. At what point will we collectively try to address the root cause instead of the end user? Again, here’s reality, with a little less imagination: Similar to the tech industry, people who architect these systems are, lo and behold, nowhere to be found when these systems go haywire. And because of this the media apparatus and their apologists uses the oldest trick in the book which is: “Let’s frame this as a them vs. them thing and let people strangle each other over hospital beds”. When in reality, all that needs to be done is break out the same checkbook that pays for all our wars. I’m sorry man, but the increased load on facilities, and furthermore, the “lack” of qualified professionals is an apologist pundit opinion full-stop, and quite frankly, borderline offensive.
  - medvezhenok 5y ago
    Honestly might be easier to do a carrot and stick incentive to get people to vaccinate so that we reach the requisite 80-90 percent. The carrot can be a check for $1000 (or whatever gets the job done), and the stick can be restrictions on indoor dining and gyms or similar. That should hopefully get us close, and might even save money compared to letting this go on forever.
dragontamer 5y ago
> The hospital strain point gets made a lot but I have one problem with this. Its been two years: have hospitals or the healthcare industry as a whole made an honest effort at upping the capacity in their facilities? It takes 10 years to train a doctor and 6 years to train a nurse. Exactly what exactly is your plan to get more doctors / more nurses? ------- In my state, we've declared an emergency. The national guard has been deployed to hospitals to run non-medical jobs. Student nurses are now allowed to work in hospitals / clinics, and we've even signed cross-state agreements to share our excess nurses in a pool with other states (so that as we get hit with COVID19 emergenies, we can help pass nurses around and better distribute the load as needed). If you got any better ideas, we're all ears. Immigrant visa applications are __heavily__ slanted towards doctors / nurses as well. Its an open secret that if you want USA-citizenship, just train to be a nurse then move here. Our systems are firing 100% on hiring more nurses and we still don't have enough of them. -------- Port-cities (we have a few of them) can make requests to the US Navy for hospital ships. This doesn't work for land-locked states but its an option for us.
- RONROC 5y ago
  We need more beds and equipment, not doctors. Sure, they’ll be overworked, but hey, when the going gets tough, the tough get going, don’t they? How about an increased emphasis on putting together the right incentives that ameliorate their personal risk tolerance just enough so that they’re OK with double shifts? Everyone has a price. So how about we just get to the part where we get those (who can and want to help) what they need so that we can move on.
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    I don't think you've grasped the reality of the situation yet. We've cut out 20% of non-essential surgeries in our state to make room for COVID19 patients. "Non-essential" surgeries include biopsies and other potential-cancer events. ------- We have plenty of hospitals actually, and equipment. USA is very very rich, we can afford anything. Its the nurses / doctors we can't afford right now, cause they're non-existent. We can poach doctors/nurses out of school, maybe grab a few more doctor/nurse immigrants, and finally pool doctors/nurses together to make them more efficiently distributed across state-lines. But that's about it. You can't squeeze blood from a stone. You can't just "magic" doctors into reality by asking them to work twice as many hours. -------- This is no longer a "find student doctors/nurses" situation. We're well into "cancel other surgeries", and triage of care. Yes, here in the USA we've run out of health-care resources.

by RONROC 5y ago

toomuchtodo 5y ago

You can’t make API calls to instantiate nurses and doctors, nor can you order them from Amazon. These are pipelines that take years to get folks through. If your question is, “Is the US healthcare system capacity not elastic?”, the answer is, unequivocally, no, no it is not. So get your vaccine(s) and don’t be an unnecessary burden on your fellow human, whether that’s someone who needs healthcare or someone who provides it.

upsidesinclude 5y ago
Hahha, uh, that's rich. Elasticity certainly could be improved by allowing nurses to return to work (those that have been terminated). OR! By increasing wages commensurate with workloads, instead of offering contract nurses 2-3x the normal rate. Your comment is shallow and belies the fact you haven't considered the problem at all, at least not honestly. You have drawn a conclusion because it sounds simple and easy and want to shame people into compliance. It's a tired tactic of late. The standard of care (that's a legal thingy, look it up) for people arriving to hospitals with mild SarsCov2 infection is to be sent HOME until symptoms worsen. This hasn't been altered as far as I can find. No treatment, zero prophylaxis. If you are interested in why hospitals look the way they do, scratch a bit deeper & and don't come parrot the propaganda we've been choking on for two years.
RONROC 5y ago
I hear you man. I’m the first person to excoriate bullshit engineer speak, but alas, I am not a CS major. So yes, I agree, API calls will not magically conjure up more healthcare NPCs. Fine. My question has nothing to do with the elasticity of the healthcare system which obviously has its own hosts of issues and which we won’t get into here. But if you’d rather pivot to that then the spirit of my response still has play: why hasn’t the healthcare industry optimized the incentives for healthcare workers to take on this Sisyphean task? Can you please point to some instances of hospital boards increasing pay, benefits, etc. that could offset the risk for these workers? I guess my major point here is that your highly rational civic minded approach to the crux of the issue here is disjointed: on one hand you lament the ineffectiveness of the healthcare system and in the same breath take a defeatist approach to it as if nothing can be done internally to alleviate the toll the virus is taking on it. And the sad reality is: it’s the same old shit, everyone wants to praise the heroes (Tiktok nurses) and yet, here we are, two years later, with the same dysfunctional system that got us here. At what point will we collectively try to address the root cause instead of the end user? Again, here’s reality, with a little less imagination: Similar to the tech industry, people who architect these systems are, lo and behold, nowhere to be found when these systems go haywire. And because of this the media apparatus and their apologists uses the oldest trick in the book which is: “Let’s frame this as a them vs. them thing and let people strangle each other over hospital beds”. When in reality, all that needs to be done is break out the same checkbook that pays for all our wars. I’m sorry man, but the increased load on facilities, and furthermore, the “lack” of qualified professionals is an apologist pundit opinion full-stop, and quite frankly, borderline offensive.
- medvezhenok 5y ago
  Honestly might be easier to do a carrot and stick incentive to get people to vaccinate so that we reach the requisite 80-90 percent. The carrot can be a check for $1000 (or whatever gets the job done), and the stick can be restrictions on indoor dining and gyms or similar. That should hopefully get us close, and might even save money compared to letting this go on forever.

dragontamer 5y ago

> The hospital strain point gets made a lot but I have one problem with this. Its been two years: have hospitals or the healthcare industry as a whole made an honest effort at upping the capacity in their facilities? It takes 10 years to train a doctor and 6 years to train a nurse. Exactly what exactly is your plan to get more doctors / more nurses? ------- In my state, we've declared an emergency. The national guard has been deployed to hospitals to run non-medical jobs. Student nurses are now allowed to work in hospitals / clinics, and we've even signed cross-state agreements to share our excess nurses in a pool with other states (so that as we get hit with COVID19 emergenies, we can help pass nurses around and better distribute the load as needed). If you got any better ideas, we're all ears. Immigrant visa applications are __heavily__ slanted towards doctors / nurses as well. Its an open secret that if you want USA-citizenship, just train to be a nurse then move here. Our systems are firing 100% on hiring more nurses and we still don't have enough of them. -------- Port-cities (we have a few of them) can make requests to the US Navy for hospital ships. This doesn't work for land-locked states but its an option for us.

RONROC 5y ago
We need more beds and equipment, not doctors. Sure, they’ll be overworked, but hey, when the going gets tough, the tough get going, don’t they? How about an increased emphasis on putting together the right incentives that ameliorate their personal risk tolerance just enough so that they’re OK with double shifts? Everyone has a price. So how about we just get to the part where we get those (who can and want to help) what they need so that we can move on.
- dragontamer 5y ago
  I don't think you've grasped the reality of the situation yet. We've cut out 20% of non-essential surgeries in our state to make room for COVID19 patients. "Non-essential" surgeries include biopsies and other potential-cancer events. ------- We have plenty of hospitals actually, and equipment. USA is very very rich, we can afford anything. Its the nurses / doctors we can't afford right now, cause they're non-existent. We can poach doctors/nurses out of school, maybe grab a few more doctor/nurse immigrants, and finally pool doctors/nurses together to make them more efficiently distributed across state-lines. But that's about it. You can't squeeze blood from a stone. You can't just "magic" doctors into reality by asking them to work twice as many hours. -------- This is no longer a "find student doctors/nurses" situation. We're well into "cancel other surgeries", and triage of care. Yes, here in the USA we've run out of health-care resources.