You can’t. That’s the point. Nursing, even at the lowest level, is not a trivial skill. The only people you could scale up at short notice like that — if there wasn’t also a general all-sector labour shortage — is nursing assistants, who have to generally do their thing under supervision of a registered nurse, which is an Associate degree or a Batchelor degree.
(There is an intermediate level of Licensed Practical Nurse who can be unsupervised but can’t supervise others, which is “just” a one year vocational course).
> But I've innovated around similar limitations in my current domain expertise so I believe it is possible.
Unless you’ve innovated around a crippling multi-state demand spike, during a general labour marked supply shortage, in a sector where getting things wrong is literally lethal and where people sue for malpractice even for sub-lethal errors despite the government mandated minimum qualification levels, I think you are making an error in thinking your experience is transferable.
(If you do have that experience, please share, as that sounds like one heck of an anecdote!)
That said: One thing you could “innovate” that would technically work is making a roving vaccination drone that hunts down and forcibly vaccinates people that don’t want a vaccine. Even ignoring medical ethics, I don’t think that’s a great idea. But technically…
Hmm, funny. I'm pretty sure I could train a non-programmer to do a specialized type of programming task in a few months if it were a crisis even though that person doesn't have a computer science degree. I don't see why healthcare is so much more difficult to train temporary specialists. Didn't we do it during WW2 (rapidly train medical specialists in a matter of months, aka medics, without a 4 year degree)?
> Unless you’ve innovated around a crippling multi-state demand spike, during a general labour marked supply shortage, in a sector where getting things wrong is literally lethal and where people sue for malpractice even for sub-lethal errors despite the government mandated minimum qualification levels, I think you are making an error in thinking your experience is transferable.
Yeah that's the real problem. Any innovations that alleviate the problem are going to run afoul of some bureaucratic, regulatory, and legal red tape put in place over the last century. So let me rephrase - I could probably innovate and solve this problem if I were a medical professional. But not without running afoul of some red tape somewhere. But I say red tape is meant to be broken in times of crisis.
> I'm pretty sure I could train a non-programmer to do a specialized type of programming task in a few months if it were a crisis even though that person doesn't have a computer science degree.
Then you’re either underestimating the complexity of programming or overestimating general skill level:
"""One of the difficult tasks was to schedule a meeting room in a scheduling application, using information contained in several email messages."""
"""Level 3 = 5% of Adult Population
…
The meeting room task described above requires level-3 skills. Another example of level-3 task is “You want to know what percentage of the emails sent by John Smith last month were about sustainability.”"""
People here are unusually good with computers.
I have no reason to think intensive care of respiratory illnesses is easier than code.
I don’t know enough medicine to say what typical treatment is, but a quick search says the entire USA has 93k ICU beds, that the number occupied by COVID patients went from 3500 in June to 26,000 in September, that the total number of COVID patients (including non-ICU) peaked at 97800 in September (and 133,250 in Jan) and that there are oxygen shortages in various hospitals worldwide because too many patients need the same treatment at the same time.
Given how easy it is to make oxygen — and to make something that makes it — a shortage of it can only happen when there are enough other things that also need to be fixed that it isn’t the limiting factor.
As someone else said elsewhere on this thread, the actual innovation is the vaccine.
> Then you’re either underestimating the complexity of programming or overestimating general skill level
The more specialized a task is, the narrower the range of skills you need to do that task. I could certainly train someone on how to do a specialized programming task such as cleaning CSV files in python in a matter of months. They wouldn't be able to do much else, but they would be able to do that fairly well.
Being a general practitioner is hard because the knowledge and skill pool is huge. Being an ultra-specialist easy by comparison.
Very often patients of rare diseases (including cancer types) know much more about their specific type of disease, known treatment methods, etc. than a general practitioner. How is this possible? The scope of their study is very narrow, so they can quickly go much deeper than a general practitioner on that one topic.
So yes, I still think it would be possible to train ultra specialized covid caretakers in a matter of months given how much we know about how the disease progresses. They don't need to know anything outside of specifically covid and they can flag any cases falling outside of their training to a more qualified person.
Think of it this way: you basically just train people to learn flow charts. The flow charts cover 90%+ of what typically happens to an ICU patient with covid. If they encounter something not in flow chart, they stop and escalate to a real nurse or doctor. You're saying such a scheme wouldn't be effective at all? I think it would free up tons of medical personnel.
> I could certainly train someone on how to do a specialized programming task such as cleaning CSV files in python in a matter of months. They wouldn't be able to do much else, but they would be able to do that fairly well.
After a few months? Average user might still be copy-pasting the # symbol, and need help every time they tried to edit and run a script because they mixed tabs and spaces.
> Very often patients of rare diseases (including cancer types) know much more about their specific type of disease, known treatment methods, etc. than a general practitioner. How is this possible? The scope of their study is very narrow, so they can quickly go much deeper than a general practitioner on that one topic.
You also get people like my mother, who took Bach flower remedies to boost memory (she died of Alzheimer’s 15 years younger than her mother of the same); or my dad, who insisted he was drinking enough water even though at that exact moment he had a drip in one arm to rehydrate him and another drip in the other arm for kidney medicine because his kidneys had almost failed due to dehydration; or people that think they can cure cancer with quack medicine like Steve Jobs did; or breatharians; or people who violently assault healthcare workers and vaccination teams during a global pandemic as in some American hospitals; or countless other examples.
Don’t get me wrong: I value free speech as a way to reduce groupthink, and that can affect experts too, but the experts are still, on average, much less wrong than non-experts. (Also applies to experts being plain wrong without groupthink, as they are humans not angels: still less wrong in their domains than the rest of us).
If medical science is anything like physics — easy to misunderstand, lots of Dunning-Kruger effect — the only people who genuinely become experts in their own diseases are unusually gifted, or already doctors (MD or PhD) or have enough other knowledge to separate real science from half-baked stuff that fails (or never entered) peer review. The rest are lucky they found real science and got close enough to understanding it too make a difference, and lotteries are not sound investment strategies for national growth.
If it’s like computer science, how many battles does the tech sector have to have with the government about cryptography? Or, heck, I’ve had clients and bosses who wanted things which aren’t even coherent, like a view remaining the same size on different sized and different aspect-ratio screens without adding borders, moving widgets, or resizing anything.
If it’s like politics, how many people want tax cuts without cutting government services, completely convinced it’s just a question of improving efficiency?
Or denigrate Media Studies as a “Mickey mouse degree”?
Or think they can beat olympian athletes?
Those are most of the personalities that go to GPs saying they know better. Only a tiny fraction are correct.
> Think of it this way: you basically just train people to learn flow charts. The flow charts cover 90%+ of what typically happens to an ICU patient with covid. If they encounter something not in flow chart, they stop and escalate to a real nurse or doctor. You're saying such a scheme wouldn't be effective at all? I think it would free up tons of medical personnel.
What makes you confident they don’t already do that? Because I think they already do that, with a separate flow chart for every condition.
Thing is, almost everything in medicine has a side effect. I just went onto Google to construct an example with commonly used painkillers, and to my mild surprise, guess what? WHO says no paracetamol for the side effects of the COVID vaccines. I was looking for which ones can’t be taken with alcohol. Untrained people, even smart and eager ones, are likely to not even know how to recognise the right moment to call in outside help.
But even if they could — let’s say an AI tricorder-esq app that can run on their phones — which sector would you deprive of much-needed workers to supply these temps?
And then you need to manufacture a few tens of thousands of sets of specific intense care equipment…
You can’t. That’s the point. Nursing, even at the lowest level, is not a trivial skill. The only people you could scale up at short notice like that — if there wasn’t also a general all-sector labour shortage — is nursing assistants, who have to generally do their thing under supervision of a registered nurse, which is an Associate degree or a Batchelor degree.
(There is an intermediate level of Licensed Practical Nurse who can be unsupervised but can’t supervise others, which is “just” a one year vocational course).
> But I've innovated around similar limitations in my current domain expertise so I believe it is possible.
Unless you’ve innovated around a crippling multi-state demand spike, during a general labour marked supply shortage, in a sector where getting things wrong is literally lethal and where people sue for malpractice even for sub-lethal errors despite the government mandated minimum qualification levels, I think you are making an error in thinking your experience is transferable.
(If you do have that experience, please share, as that sounds like one heck of an anecdote!)
That said: One thing you could “innovate” that would technically work is making a roving vaccination drone that hunts down and forcibly vaccinates people that don’t want a vaccine. Even ignoring medical ethics, I don’t think that’s a great idea. But technically…