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My dad could still be alive, but he's not

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Re: My dad could still be alive, but he's not

#221

Post by jandrewrogers »

grogenaut wrote: post #138
fsckboy wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fire crews here in BC are dispatched to severe medical incidents (like heart attacks) and most of the time can even beat ambulance crews to a scene according to the blog post, the father was talking (said "be careful" about a left hand turn) and apparently ambulatory (collapsed on his way into the hospital), so perhaps it wasn't yet considered a severe medical incident yet. in the post she was told by her mother th…

At least in my area, King County area, a call of severe chest pain would immediately get units rolling code (lights+sirens) for CHEST PAIN. Pulse point, which works in our area, would also start paging BLS certified people in the neighborhood who have the app. When I've called 911, the dispatchers grilled me going right down the list of signs and symptoms and did an excellent triage job. I'm a volunteer EMT / FF at a…

FWIW, Seattle is famously one of the top cities in which to have a serious medical emergency. Very fast response and state-of-the-art care.

Re: My dad could still be alive, but he's not

#223

Post by rogerrogerr »

captainkrtek wrote: post #125
tredre3 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can one preemptively test if they have an allergy? Is there a dosage that is known to trigger detectable allergy symptoms without going full anaphylaxis? I'm getting up there in age and that is presumably something that I should learn about myself...

As an EMT, I’d say to ask your primary care provider :-) Don’t want to suggest you do something and end up with anaphylaxis.

And this right here is the problem. Possibly-imperfect knowledge is being self-censored for legal concerns, and what we are left with is silence.

A bunch of people don’t even have a primary care provider now.

Re: My dad could still be alive, but he's not

#224

Post by pas »

laszlojamf wrote: post #156
weddpros wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not desired by whom? I think transparency is desired by citizens/customers. Do you think there are (good) reasons why obscurity is preferred?

FWIW: In Sweden, there's been a bunch of cases of emergency personnel being attacked when responding to incidents

if someone wants to attack them they can call them. so what's the point of not providing this very useful information to the public?

Re: My dad could still be alive, but he's not

#225

Post by pertymcpert »

bonsai_spool wrote: post #154
pertymcpert wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t see how being a dishonest person committing research fraud should disqualify you from treating patients?

> You don’t see how being a dishonest person committing research fraud should disqualify you from treating patients? Correct. And, a panel of this person's peers found that, in fact, the alleged research fraud should not disqualify the person from treating patients.

It certainly wasn’t unanimous. I generally hold my doctors to a higher ethical standard given they’re dealing with people’s lives. Maybe you have lower standards.

Re: My dad could still be alive, but he's not

#226

Post by pas »

filleduchaos wrote: post #144
weddpros wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not desired by whom? I think transparency is desired by citizens/customers. Do you think there are (good) reasons why obscurity is preferred?

Personally I see plenty of problems with a real-time public broadcast of all the addresses a medical event has occurred at, the patients' location in transit, and the hospitals that received those patients. "Ambulance chaser" is a rather derogatory phrase for a reason.

there's no need to post 7 digits accurate GPS coordinates, the important thing is to have an understanding of how many are how far from where they are going to, ETA, what's the capacity (free units ready or cars yes crew not, or vice versa)

Re: My dad could still be alive, but he's not

#227

Post by pas »

drgo wrote: post #126
anonymousiam wrote: post #107

The post mentions Toronto, so I'm going to assume that the publicly funded Canadian health care system bears some responsibility for the sad outcome.

Yes. If emergency services were run by a private company, like airlines for example, they will never ever be 30 minutes late!

that's not exactly fair, air travel is very well optimized for safety and costs, not for availability and latency (and cost in public systems)

Re: My dad could still be alive, but he's not

#228

Post by godelski »

kelnos wrote: post #213
godelski wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're told a lot of things by "officials" not because it's correct Often these rules are in place because they are statistically correct. What needs to be understood is that no rule can be so well written that there are no exceptions. Rules are guides. Understanding this we can understand why certain guidelines are created, because they are likely the right response 9/10 times. This is especially important when dea…

This was exactly what I was thinking (though less eruditely) when I was reading the blog post. In this particular case, waiting for the ambulance led to a worse outcome, but I would not be surprised that, statistically, a you're better off waiting for the ambulance than trying to get to the hospital via other means. But unfortunately: > if the operator had information about the ETA of the ambulance (we don't know thi…

  > I expect the operator just is not allowed to give advice like that
Maybe, but that's why I tried to stress the end part of empowering the workers. Empowering your "people on the ground" and stressing how you can't rule from a spreadsheet.

I also want to say that I'm giving this advice as someone who loves math, data, and statistics. Someone who's taken and studied much more math than the average STEM major. It baffles me how people claim to be data oriented yet do not recognize how critical noise is. Noise is a literal measurement of uncertainty. We should strive to reduce noise, but its abolishment is quite literally impossible. It must be accounted for rather than ignored.

So that's why I'm giving this advice. It's because it's how you strategize based on the data. All data needs to be interpreted, scrutinized, and questioned. And constantly, because we're not in a static world. So the only way to deal with that unavoidable noise is to have adaptable mechanisms that can deal with the details and nuances that get fuzzy when you do large aggregations. In the real world the tail of distributions are long and heavy.

A rigid structure is brittle and weak. The strongest structures are flexible, even if they appear stiff for the most part. It doesn't matter if you're building a skyscraper, a bridge, a business, or an empire. This is a universal truth because we'll never be omniscient. As long as we're not omniscient there will is noise, and you have to deal with it

Re: My dad could still be alive, but he's not

#229

Post by stinkbeetle »

roncesvalles wrote: post #137
stinkbeetle wrote: post #55

> my dad is dead, because his family members were too naive to know that the thing they were instructed to do by the state was a false thing. The primary goal of the state is to ensure the power of the state is perpetuated. It's really the only goal of the state, anything it does good for its people is a side effect in its pursuit of maintaining power. The government doesn't care about you, doesn't care about your he…

>The primary goal of the state is to ensure the power of the state is perpetuated. Well, that makes sense considering failure of the state is a very, very bad situation.

That's not why it makes sense. And it's not even true, the failure of Pol Pot's communist state was best for the greater good, the failure of the Nazi state was a good thing. The failure of the Islamic State was great too (not always necessarily true for everybody who have hitched their wagons or bet their fortune on the success of the state of course, but for most people).

Whether the success or failure of the state is good or bad for people is irrelevant to the goal of the state, as I said. You can and do have states that are better or worse for the people, all share the goal of the perpetuation of the power of the state.

Re: My dad could still be alive, but he's not

#230

Post by MattRix »

bensonn wrote: post #217

I won't call clickbait on this as it is a personal site and the headline is accurate. I saw another article recently with the same issues. He is dead from a heart attack. If dispatch, EMS, hospitals, etc. didn't exist doesn't mean he would be alive. They didn't kill him, they failed to save him. The other article I saw was how the hospital "killed" a drowning victim. Water was never mentioned. There are many failures…

I’ve gotta say I’m almost impressed at how callous this response to the story is.
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