Medical professionals learn how to do their entire job in a similar time frame. Ventilator operation is surely a small part of that. I'd be astonished if it would take someone more than a week or two to learn the basic mechanics of how to use a ventilator. None of the theory or nuances, but a course that says "hook it up like this, do X, Y and Z and come get me if this or that happens".
Regarding whether doctors would want undertrained help - that's immaterial. If current healthcare workers have the capacity to handle the pending wave of sick people, then that's great and we shouldn't get in their way. If they have another, better solution, then let's do that. If the alternative to having minimally trained people operate ventilators is letting people die without any intervention - I'd want to see some explanation or evidence as to why letting people die is better.
To my exceptionally limited understanding - and I would love to be corrected if I'm wrong - operating a ventilator correctly is not a matter of standing in front of a machine and watching a few numbers for problematic readings. That can be done by machines and computers. What requires training is everything else around it, which requires an understanding of medical protocols, anatomy, the ability to respond usefully to emergencies without being in the way, and so on.
Which is to say that this is not something that highly specialized and narrow technicians can be usefully trained for in a very short time at this particular moment.
That's not to say your idea is bad! It's definitely good and worth exploring in the future. There will be time to explore how to have smarter tools that can be used with a less general skillset can be developed. There will also be time to explore how to develop specialized and narrow curricula for such things - itself not a trivial task.
This thread isn’t about automating medical professionals responsibilities one task at a time, or attempting to step on their egos. I’m as proud of their title, their coat, and their debt as they are.
If a pandemic respiratory virus is not the time to “consider exploring” this idea, when is? When people are left to die in their homes because the ambulances stop taking calls...?
We are, of course, just shooting out ideas of grandeur. A reactive strategy will be maintained, people will die, and everyone will throw their hands up in the sky and say “nothing else could have been done. March simply was not the time to think about COVID-specific medical operation efficiencies. There will, however, be a time to explore...”
Please accept my deepest apologies if I have in any way seemed to imply that the current reactive strategy is an ideal long-term solution. I do not in any way think this.
Don't hesitate to ask if there's anything else I can clarify for you - I frequently fail to express myself as well as I'd like.
This will happen soon or not at all. The AMA and its equivalents worldwide have a very consistent attitude to anyone, anywhere being allowed to do anything a doctor can do. It should not be allowed. Psychologists should not be allowed prescribe; nurse practitioners should not be allowed practice independently under any circumstances, etc.
Indeed, doctors did more harm than good until the early 1900s at the earliest, and we can only be sure that they were on net leading to lower rather than higher mortality with the introduction of antibiotics.
Younger doctors without 4 years onsite experience are still probably extremely capable and I’m sure you’re right, they can learn how to do a subset of their eventual job very short amount of time and do it well if given the chance.
It sounds like there is some fundamental idealogical opposition to this.
I have a friend who is going through her residency now, she has to deal with a lot of very unhealthy psychological and physical treatment (ridiculously long hours) to get through it. Sounds more like a hazing than a professional introduction.
Now in war, you have to throw bodies at a problem, and if the bodies end up 6 ft under, that's war. But generally bad pilots only kill themselves, they don't kill patient after patient through malpractice.
It's quite interesting to hear the opinion of someone who has both education and hands on experience directly in the field, and then compare that opinion to the opinions of those who have neither.
Getting nurses, doctors from other specialties, or even medical students through an intensive training is one thing, and I suspect it's actually a good idea. These are people who have (or, in the case of students, are at least likely to have) the knowledge required not just to learn how to operate a piece of machinery, but also to understand when they're in over their heads, when to ask for help, and to understand the magnitude of what they're doing.
But IMHO -- also based on my experience in other potentially dangerous fields -- putting people with zero medical education except for a thirty-day training in charge of observing people in a life-or-death situation is a really bad idea. Under-educated, even if well-trained assistance has a very high potential of making things worse, not better -- worse than doing nothing at all, that is.
Running a ventilator as in pushing the right buttons is something you can learn to do just by reading the manual. I can obviously operate every medical device I've worked on. I've obviously had more than 30 days of exposure to them. And nonetheless, I think the chances of getting someone killed by operating them are extremely high. I am also 100% convinced that they are much higher than the chances of someone who's had some medical education doing the same thing, even if they've never seen that machine and have never read the manual. What doctors and nurses do with the things I've built is way above my level of understanding.
I can't speak for medical students but I can guarantee that, if you let 30 final-year engineering students walk around a power plant without constant supervision, one of them will get themselves killed by the end of the day. And that's after three years of education. 30 days shouldn't even get you past the lobby.
I'm reading that hospitals may be overwhelmed. I understand that to mean there will be more people requiring intensive care than capacity to give intensive care. If the choice is between the hospital sending people who need ventilators off to die and sending them to someone with thirty days of training and good intentions... Well, my intuition is that you'd have better outcomes with the latter.
The point is not "can we do this without killing people." Nope. More people will die with amateur ventilator-operators than professionals. What I'm suggesting is that more people will die without amateur ventilator-operators in the event hospitals are overwhelmed.
If we think hospitals are going to be overwhelmed in thirty days then the time to start training amateur ventilator-operators is now.
Given that we likely have more spare doctor cycles now than we will in the future, we should utilize them now. We can also do things like hire doctors from countries not as badly stressed to come teach the classes.
And of course there are many levels to addressing bottlenecks. For example, operators wouldn’t have to be amateurs at first, they could be any of the non-essential medical professionals who are not able operate business as usual due to the virus. Could a podiatrist or urologist operate a ventilator given enough training?
In general we are brainstorming proactive measures. I think, at least in the US, we continue to have a reactive as opposed to a proactive strategy because of our decentralized government structure as well as the delicate balance between effective mitigation and maintaining social order. While we should be leveraging the current shelter in place strategy to build as much healthcare infrastructure as possible (both physical and technical, as per the thread) to handle slowly returning society to normal operations, we probably are not moving fast enough. In several weeks, as the unemployment and anxiety builds, so too will unrest. And I guess then it will really be a test of a nation’s people.
It takes an inordinate amount of time just to teach people what they can and can't touch and when and how, how to wash their hands properly, how to put on and take off their masks/gloves, and where to stand so as not to be in the way of people. All this in the context of a pretty contagious disease. I am pretty sure that, within 20 days, most of the volunteers would be infected themselves, and end up putting even more strain on the system.
I've been in an OR as part of my job, and I'd definitely think twice before enrolling in a program like this one (and definitely not just for my own safety, although yeah, that would be a big factor, too).
https://www.vettimes.co.uk/news/veterinary-sector-primed-to-...
But my SO runs, (COO), a system of hospitals. Including some teaching hospitals. And part of their plan definitely includes sequestering final year med students and all residents at their respective homes. Apparently the idea is that as hospital staff go down, this pool of residents and med students can be drawn on.
I know she stays up nights worried sick that residents might go to a party, or invite their boyfriend over, or engage in some other risky behavior instead of stay home alone and safeguard their health. So I get the idea that they really don't have a backup to that plan. I suspect med students and residents are a pretty critical part of the plan for surge operations across the nation.
Just pointing that out because I think hospital administrators and medical directors are starting to plan on doing things they wouldn't normally do. Like pressing 4th year med students into service, or taking 68 year old women off of ventilators if a 33 year old woman presents with a need for it. It's not so much a question of what doctors want to do, as it is a question of doing what has to be done to get through this with the maximum number of recoveries.
The person was asking a question, not proposing a plan of only training people for thirty days.
This thread is a like a giant version of that telephone game that we used to play in school, except in that game you didn't have the advantage of reading the exact words that the person said, as we can in this thread.
Of course, it flies in the face of a common sense view that someone careful, able to follow orders, just hold things or press button etc would provide some use in a world where the doctors are fundamentally limited.
It seems like a world where the medical industry has piled goldstandard-or-nothing upon goldstandard-or-nothing approaches, to the point yeah, doctors really don't know how to produce useful people without those fricken' eight years or twelve years. Well friend, you should start thinking "outside the box" about how to make other people useful or many, many people will dies.
FYI: The US produces field medic with 16 week training period after basic training. That might who you want attending to you but things are going to be resembling a war zone really soon.
And, yeah, maybe I know little of what exactly ICU processes are but it seems indeed implausible that there are no intermediate levels of skills that are the slightest bit helpful, just about physical task can aided by a "third hand" etc.