Going from zero to medical professional - not a doctor, just someone who can perform invasive medical procedures without killing a large number of people - isn't 30 days of work. Ignoring that reality will recklessly endanger people's lives.
If we're talking veterinarians, dentists, nurses, residents, MDs in unrelated specialties - then sure! They actually have the requisite knowlege and manual dexterity to cross-train. But going from, say SWE to ventilator operator, is not a 30 day crash course.
> If you think an amateur operator is worse than no operator, I'd like to see your evidence. If all you have is your intuition then my intuition is that you're wrong.
Because then you end up wasting a life and keeping a ventilator occupied, when there are much more efficient ways to kill patients that don't involve misusing a ventilator.
Former scientist, including (lab side) FDA trials. Medicine is complicated. Even sterile technique, to make sure you don't inadvertently give your patient a life-threatening infection in the process of "helping" them, can take years to get right. This is true of the most routine aspects of any kind of medical work.
But, do tell: since my "intuition" is so obviously wrong, I want to hear all about your empirical research. Or let's just start with your credentials, medical or otherwise.
This pretty much dissolves your only real objection, that we'd be keeping a ventilator occupied that would otherwise be in use. Nope. The solution to a deficit of ventilators is producing more - not letting people die without them.
Generally, you are trying to invent reasons and restrictions to make trying to train ventilator-operators seem like a bad idea rather than understanding or advancing how the idea might be viable. An example of this is how you acknowledge that training other medical adjacent professionals (e.g. vetrenarians) would likely work. Great, you agree the idea could work. If you expect that our capacity will be overwhelmed then presumably you think we should training additional operators. Instead of reaching that conclusion you imagine reasons to object to the idea though.
A SWE would likely be worse than a vet after a bootcamp. That's a good reason to have some entry requirements to the bootcamp and those requirements could be relaxed or strengthened depending on where we expect demand to be in 30 days relative to supply. A SWE through a 30-day bootcamp would likely be better than nothing.
The other main constraint you've imagined is that they would need to save more people than they kill to be worthwhile. No, they'd need to save more people than would die without them. If it would be better to just struggle to breathe than have an amateur operator, that would be an argument against them.
Your credentials, whatever they are, haven't equipped you to clearly communicate your reasons for opposing this idea. As I mentioned, it seems like you actually support some version of it.
So in a hypothetical situation, where existing permanent healthcare infrastructure is at capacity, field hospitals are setup and existing medical professional staff need to be divided amongst the existing and newly supplemented infrastructure, what is your suggestion to save the most lives?
This exercise of sharing ideas, informing, critiquing is what this forum is for. Disagree and casting shame for a lack of first-hand professional experience is not educational and it’s not what this forum embodies.
I want to be as informed as possible so I can call BS when politicians say “nothing at all could have been done.”
So here's my idea: stop treating invasive medical procedures as something that can be trivially learned in a short amount of time. In short, drop the God complex. You're out of your depth here.
The need for action doesn't mean acting foolish. Irrational behavior in the name of "just doing something" will needlessly deplete more resources.
I am genuinely interested in what your suggestion would be though. This is me asking. What would you do to address in the hypothetical I proposed?
As I mentioned above, cross-training medical professionals in adjacent fields sounds more practical. Allowing nurses to do more of what the doctors typically do is another. Even just offloading some of the administrative paperwork for clinicians to admin staff might make a significant dent. Relaxing any bottle-neck non-essential bureaucratic requirements slowing down access to treatment or acquisition of new equipment and supplies.
Having said that, I also recognize that the ideas I just came up with in the last 30 seconds are just that: ideas off the top of my head, coming from someone with no actual experience in healthcare management.
Basically, my first priority would be to make an informed decision, and that starts with figuring out what I don't know, and filling in those gaps. Rather than uncritically insisting, quite emphatically, that medicine can be solved with a 30-day boot camp. Because, hey, if it worked for tech then it must work for medicine!
Perhaps you should take your own advice, rather than responding with personal vitriol directed at the users countering your point.
I'm still waiting for you to reply to the questions I asked in the thread that you kept trying to change the subject away from. When I wouldn't let you do that, and kept bringing you back on topic, you ran away because you'd painted yourself into a corner with glaring contradictions in the things you said, and there was no way you could resolve the contradictions except by admitting you didn't really mean what you said.
I'll share a piece of advice that a good friend of mine told me a few years ago: The mind is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master.
I didn't really understand what he was talking about at the time, I thought it was just another one of those silly platitudes that people who've smoked a bit too much drugs say. But after pondering it over the years, it has become one of my very favorite sayings.
Perhaps you think our capacity won't be overwhelmed. Then it would make perfect sense not to bother training amateur operators. If you think an amateur operator is worse than no operator, I'd like to see your evidence. If all you have is your intuition then my intuition is that you're wrong.