The U.S. tried to build a new fleet of ventilators

Re:The U.S. tried to build a new fleet of ventilators by marnett on Sunday March 29, 2020 @11:01PM (#22724847)

As the contrarian, can you at least enlighten us to what, in your opinion, would be the best strategy to proactively address potential bottlenecks? I think we can all agree, career shaming aside, that medical professionals and engineers of all varieties actively participate in mindsets geared towards problem solving.

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.”

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Re:The U.S. tried to build a new fleet of ventilators by omar_a1 on Sunday March 29, 2020 @11:18PM (#22724927)

I fail to see how explaining that, "Yes, you need to know medicine to practice medicine, or people will die" is considered being contrarian. Would you rather just revel in ignorance?

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.

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Re:The U.S. tried to build a new fleet of ventilators by marnett on Monday March 30, 2020 @12:59AM (#22725378)

> 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?

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Re:The U.S. tried to build a new fleet of ventilators by omar_a1 on Monday March 30, 2020 @01:32AM (#22725503)

For one, if I were hypothetically responsible for addressing this crisis, I would be talking to the nurses and doctors to figure out what level of training is actually necessary to operate these ventilators. I'd also ask what else they actually need: if we get them ventilators but nothing else they're short on, we're still in trouble. In other words, I would recognize that I'm out of my league here and ask the actual professionals on the front lines of this crisis.

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!

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