The Apgar Score helped decrease the infant mortality rate
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Re: The Apgar Score helped decrease the infant mortality rate
#2This is, I think, a good contrast to the "management by metrics" article currently sharing the front page. Attempting to govern through massive data or singular narrow measures each seen like folly. A broad, even vague, "directionally correct" measure is an excellent tool for keeping an enterprise aligned.
Re: The Apgar Score helped decrease the infant mortality rate
#3Having recently had a child, I learned about APGAR and marveled how the emotional "is my baby ok" was put into a super easy process. The chart from the article can be followed by absolutely anyone and babies can be sent to specialists as needed - or not. As the article mentions, it may not get everything 100% right, but it's useful enough - and more importantly easy enough - to save a lot of lives.
I can highly recommend anyone to read about the process of medical emergency triage in general. It drastically reduces the knowledge needed to solve complex situations and gives you something to hold on to when things get hot. Seeing these stressful problems reduced to if-else flows was very inspirational for me for designing ways to tackle urgent issues in other areas of life, e.g. tech support, service requests or HR.
Re: The Apgar Score helped decrease the infant mortality rate
#4This is, I think, a good contrast to the "management by metrics" article currently sharing the front page. Attempting to govern through massive data or singular narrow measures each seen like folly. A broad, even vague, "directionally correct" measure is an excellent tool for keeping an enterprise aligned.
I’ve been thinking about this since I started working at a metrics driven company.
One thing we often lose sight of is that metrics are coarse grained. Something like GDP for example is very good at telling you that the USA is a better place to live than Somalia. But it fails for more fine grained comparisons. We should refrain from doing micro optimizations on coarse grained metrics or ranking people on its basis unless the change is truly massive and validated.
Metrics also need counter metrics. For GDP growth it maybe things like inequality, pollution, stress levels and so on.
Metrics also need to continuously evolve as people understand their limitations.
Metrics are a tool of social coordination and one of the most powerful ones to exist.
Re: The Apgar Score helped decrease the infant mortality rate
#5This is, I think, a good contrast to the "management by metrics" article currently sharing the front page. Attempting to govern through massive data or singular narrow measures each seen like folly. A broad, even vague, "directionally correct" measure is an excellent tool for keeping an enterprise aligned.
Apples and oranges.
The Apgar score isn't something that would normally be gamed, as it applies to a single infant.
Whereas organizational metrics are nothing but games.
Re: The Apgar Score helped decrease the infant mortality rate
#6Having recently had a child, I learned about APGAR and marveled how the emotional "is my baby ok" was put into a super easy process. The chart from the article can be followed by absolutely anyone and babies can be sent to specialists as needed - or not. As the article mentions, it may not get everything 100% right, but it's useful enough - and more importantly easy enough - to save a lot of lives. I can highly recom…
> I can highly recommend anyone to read about the process of medical emergency triage in general
Any recommendations? I had a search about but didn't find anything much beyond basic explanations of the term.
Re: The Apgar Score helped decrease the infant mortality rate
#7> In the 1950s, reducing infant mortality (the death of an infant before their first birthday) was a daunting problem: an astonishing one in 30 newborns died at birth.
> At that time, if a newborn didn’t seem to be thriving – if, for example, the baby’s skin was too blue or they were deemed too small – the baby would be left to die and documented as a stillborn.
It sounds like the problem was that doctors were practicing applied eugenics.
Re: The Apgar Score helped decrease the infant mortality rate
#8Having recently had a child, I learned about APGAR and marveled how the emotional "is my baby ok" was put into a super easy process. The chart from the article can be followed by absolutely anyone and babies can be sent to specialists as needed - or not. As the article mentions, it may not get everything 100% right, but it's useful enough - and more importantly easy enough - to save a lot of lives. I can highly recom…
Isn't APGAR useful only for newborns?
Re: The Apgar Score helped decrease the infant mortality rate
#9Having recently had a child, I learned about APGAR and marveled how the emotional "is my baby ok" was put into a super easy process. The chart from the article can be followed by absolutely anyone and babies can be sent to specialists as needed - or not. As the article mentions, it may not get everything 100% right, but it's useful enough - and more importantly easy enough - to save a lot of lives. I can highly recom…
Isn't APGAR useful only for newborns?
Yes. It happens after birth. The paediatric nurse takes a look based on the checklist and ranks the baby out of 10. Our kid was an 8 but required NICU for the 2 they were missing. But if it's even lower they can immediately intervene, etc.
Re: The Apgar Score helped decrease the infant mortality rate
#10Having recently had a child, I learned about APGAR and marveled how the emotional "is my baby ok" was put into a super easy process. The chart from the article can be followed by absolutely anyone and babies can be sent to specialists as needed - or not. As the article mentions, it may not get everything 100% right, but it's useful enough - and more importantly easy enough - to save a lot of lives. I can highly recom…
Isn't APGAR useful only for newborns?
Indeed