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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Typical for tech oriented people to look at it this way. Patients with the same condition are still meatware and each has the capacity to develop their own variation on a large number of themes all of which require adaptations in treatment regime and sometimes very rapid intervention lest you lose a patient.

Your assumption doesn't hold.

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I assume OP is referring to conditions during a pandemic. There have been numerous reports out of Italy about how they are operating under a wartime triage system - presumably under these conditions the response is more focused on repetition of the same process rather than unique personalised care.

No, it's the fact that you need unique personalized care that makes it complex.

Triage is just to deal with limited resources, essentially it divides the applicants into 'walking', 'dead' and 'care', and the fewer resources you have the more people will get sorted into the 'dead' category even if they still have a pulse when you see them. The 'care' category will still get unique personalized care otherwise you might as well sort them into the 'dead' category on the spot.

It's not a choice between a doctor and a layman, though. It's a choice between a volunteer who's only trained in the very basics and watched a couple of intubations, and nobody at all.

How much training does someone need before they become a clear net positive for the patient?

I rather had in mind a nurse who would step up but still know when to call the doctor when things look unusual.

A couple of years should do it. A volunteer would not just be a 'net negative' but would leave a lot of dead people. Why is it so hard to see that the people that operate this stuff are not just button pushers but specialists that have been schooled over years to take care of people?

The ICU staff would not even allow the doctors to mess with their setup because it is critical and it is their responsibility until some either dies or is discharged from the ICU and allowed to move back to a normal ward.

Think 'airline pilot' not 'assembly line worker'.

Again, it's clear that a volunteer is far worse than a trained professional. At what amount of training does a volunteer become better than nothing?

If I had to choose between an uncontrolled emergency landing, and an emergency landing done by a volunteer who did two days of training, I'd choose the volunteer every time. I understand that the volunteer does not have the training to fly or land safely and that becoming an airline pilot takes a lot of training, but that doesn't matter if there's no pilot available.

If 20% of patients die with trained ICU staff, 90% die with no ICU staff, and 70% die with a trained volunteer, and you have no more ICU staff, then the volunteer is a net positive and the volunteer has left a lot of dead people. The question is not whether the volunteer is even anywhere close to a trained professional in effectiveness, it's whether the volunteer is better than sticking a red or black tag on someone's bed and leaving them to die.

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