Hacker News Reader

Comment by waterhouse | Hacker News Reader

"Yes, Minister" has an episode about a hospital with 500 employees and no patients: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAk448volww

The show's creators said: "After inventing this absurdity, we discovered there were six such hospitals (or very large empty wings of hospitals) exactly as we had described them in our episode, notably one in Cambridgeshire in which there was only one patient: the Matron (head of nursing staff) who had fallen over some scaffolding and broken her leg."

View on HN

2019: all these empty hospitals with too much staff and no patients?! Let's close them down, save some money!

2020: why is our medical system running at 90% capacity in normal times?! Why don't we have some idle capacity for emergencies (natural disaster, pandemic, war)?

Baseline capacity and the ability to scale up to withstand peaks are two separate things.

This may apply to equipment and even buildings to a certain extent, but qualified nurses are not something you can just purchase off the shelf like a new rack of servers when demand is high. This applies doubly so for intensive care, which even regular (i.e. non-ICU) nurses are not qualified for without prior training. Where are those people going to come from when demand peaks?

> This may apply to equipment and even buildings to a certain extent, but qualified nurses are not something you can just purchase off the shelf like a new rack of servers when demand is high.

Professional training is not the same as hiring people to idle. See how emergency response services mobilize in case of any emergency scenario, and how that does not involve hiring armies of firemen and police officers to idle by.

The flip side of this is that if have excess capacity for medical treatment, that can be incredibly helpful in the case of a rare event such as a terrorist attack or a pandemic.

Excess capacity doesn't have to be 100% operational at all times.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com