> As Frakt says, solutions aren’t hard to fathom. In fact, they’re trivially easy to figure out.
Lots of things are "easy to figure out", and also "really hard to implement correctly".
Managing the care of a lot of different people with different conditions over long periods of time is complex and error-prone. You can't stand around all day in a hospital trying to figure out if you missed an edge case in a patient's customized care plan. Not only are you tremendously busy, but making a mistake in that customized plan could mean life or death. Routine is much safer and more reliable.
It's not impossible to improve patient care, but it is tremendously more difficult than a layman can observe just by sitting in a hospital bed.
My own anecdote...
A few years ago, I spent the night in a cardiac ICU due to an arrhythmia. I also have a VERY low resting heart rate (<35bpm when sleeping). The alarm on the EKG is set at 35bpm. The alarm can ring in the room, the nurses station, or both. For an overnight stay, why on earth would they leave the room alarm on? After a long night of being awakened seconds after dozing off, the morning shift nurse stopped by and asked "why on earth wouldn't they switch off this silly alarm?" and walked back to her station to do just that.
Edit - the nurses on the overnight shift asked about my resting HR once, then ignored the alarm the rest of the night.
Absoutely! My mum used to work as a Senior Nurse and there were numerous "simple things" that could save time and money but there were various reasons why they didn't happen:
* You don't have the authority to change it
* The person who does have authority is too far removed to care
* There is simply too much work to do to think about leaving the patients alone
* There are frustrating restrictions on e.g. approved suppliers so that you can't simply change something that would seem to make sense
* Although things like beeping IV machines are annoying, they also prove they are running correctly - no sound might mean nothing or it might mean broken!
Anyone who claims making changes in healthcare is "trivial" doesn't know what they are talking about. Period.
The political forces that oppose change in an industry that is incredibly rigid and risk averse (for obvious, albeit frustrating, reasons - "move slow break nothing" is the rule when the risk of failure is death) are the actual challenge. The technicals are the easy part.
Lots of things are "easy to figure out", and also "really hard to implement correctly".
Managing the care of a lot of different people with different conditions over long periods of time is complex and error-prone. You can't stand around all day in a hospital trying to figure out if you missed an edge case in a patient's customized care plan. Not only are you tremendously busy, but making a mistake in that customized plan could mean life or death. Routine is much safer and more reliable.
It's not impossible to improve patient care, but it is tremendously more difficult than a layman can observe just by sitting in a hospital bed.