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The Apgar Score helped decrease the infant mortality rate

massivesci.com

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Re: The Apgar Score helped decrease the infant mortality rate

#11

Post by marsvin »

bomdo wrote: post #3

Having 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…

It was great to hear him being 8/10 and soon up to 9/10. So comforting and removing all that unnecessary fear. Days and hours right before that moment were so exhausting that simple number was easy to process.

Re: The Apgar Score helped decrease the infant mortality rate

#12

Post by bwood »

> The newborn’s skin was blue and he wasn’t breathing. A few years earlier, the doctors would have documented the baby as stillborn, not believing there was anything they could do to help.

As someone who scored a 1/10 on the Apgar at birth, I'd like to thank Dr. Apgar for saving my life.

Re: The Apgar Score helped decrease the infant mortality rate

#13

Post by Enginerrrd »

thewarrior wrote: post #4
joe-collins wrote: post #2

This 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 un…

My personal opinion is that metrics should be largely invisible, only becoming visible at the level of management where decisions are made. Anything else leads to exactly what you just said: misguided micro-optimizations and gamesmanship.

Re: The Apgar Score helped decrease the infant mortality rate

#14

Post by xattt »

cranekam wrote: post #6
bomdo wrote: post #3

Having 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.

Consider this chapter on assessment from the Trauma Nursing Core Course (1). The full provider manual may be hard to obtain, however.

(1) https://notendur.hi.is/thorsj/gogn/TNCC.pdf

Re: The Apgar Score helped decrease the infant mortality rate

#16

Post by dave_aiello »

My wife is a pediatrician. She uses Apgar Scores in evaluating babies weeks and months after birth. From what I understand, it's often useful to know the 1-minute and 5-minute Apgar Scores of an infant or young child, and specifically why they were scored less than 9/10 or 10/10, because some of these issues are germane to that child's future development.

Re: The Apgar Score helped decrease the infant mortality rate

#17

Post by pjc50 »

joe-collins wrote: post #2

This 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 think this might count as a "checklist" rather than a "metric", and crucially there aren't quite the same incentives to game the metric.

Re: The Apgar Score helped decrease the infant mortality rate

#18

Post by choeger »

thewarrior wrote: post #4
joe-collins wrote: post #2

This 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 un…

GDP is an excellent example, I think. Basically, it measures the total flow of wealth inside a country. If everyone behaves rationally this is a good proxy for wealth as a whole. But what happens if the government would setup a group of companies that trade immaterial or trivial products amongst each other at absurd prices? The faster that group trades, the higher the GDP. A metric has become a goal.

Re: The Apgar Score helped decrease the infant mortality rate

#19

Post by unfocused »

I know this score too well. Our second child scored a 2/10, as he was not breathing. My heart nearly stopped. But the nurses were quick to get to work, and all is well now, years later.

I think simple, quick assessment tools, allow fast, correct reactions - which in this scenario is an absolute must.

Re: The Apgar Score helped decrease the infant mortality rate

#20

Post by matkoniecz »

tboyd47 wrote: post #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 practi…

Exactly the next sentence is

"Of course, it wasn’t that anyone wanted these babies to die, but doctors simply believed that they were too sick to survive."

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