Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

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I've read about this "assembly line surgery" being tried in the US as well. But the purpose was to experiment with replacing some of the more junior doctors with technicians. For example, there would be a technician who is only trained in opening the chest for heart surgery. That would be all they do, going from room to room opening chest cavities. Another technician would only do suturing at the end. These technicians would not be doctors, they would be folks who would get about as much training as an EMT (about 150 hours).

The next step after that is replacing the technicians with robots.

The only downside to this system (robots or technicians) is how will you ever get experienced doctors to do the hard stuff if they never get to practice doing the routine stuff first?

I’ve worked as a surgical technician and can say that this already occurs in most hospitals. It was within my scope of practice to help the doctor suture at the end of the case as well as apply staples and bandaging so that they didn’t need to.

> The only downside to this system (robots or technicians) is how will you ever get experienced doctors to do the hard stuff if they never get to practice doing the routine stuff first?

I think this argument applies to any kind of progress. As technology evolves, society loses skills, but the net benefit is hugely positive. Eventually, we don't even remember that the skills we lost were skills we once had. We get by.

This is a bonafide question as I really don't know.

Could you train a surgeon without them ever being a doctor? Basically extract out the knowledge they need and train simply for that? It seems to me that the natural skills needed might be very different than those you need to make it through a typical medical school + a career as a family doctor.

Not only that - not all hospitals follow this assembly line, if this chain of hospitals goes under what about the opportunities for someone doing the routinely 1 part of the surgery.

Not to mention I'd bet a smaller job like that results in less context and thus higher rates of mistakes.

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