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Comment by herodotus | Hacker News Reader

It has been speculated for some time that fewer patients die when hospitals are on strike. See for example: https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/slightly-blighty/201...

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Speaking as someone with a health care worker in the family who just went on strike, I think this makes a lot of sense. When hospital workers go on strike, it often forces the hospital to go on diversion, leading to other hospitals taking on all new patients, who are usually in some form of medical crisis and have a higher chance of dying than stabilized patients already under care. Thus, it makes sense that a hospital which has workers that go on strike have a lower death rate on average.

The article mentions controlling for this in numerous ways. It was looking at elective surgeries, as well as county wide mortality rates and not just a single hospital. That said, in the elective surgery cases it could well be a spin on what you're mentioning and people just deferred their surgeries until after the strike. You'd think surely they also controlled for this, though.

Where I am, diversion wouldn’t help. The system is nationalised so all the hospitals would strike.

When people die during a surgery they die immidiately, but when their lives get extended after a surgery, it only happens years later.

As someone dealing with elder care of multiple family members I also believe mental anguish caused by medical environments, including insurance and billing in the US, and the dismissiveness of hospice care (you’re taking too long to die, speed it up or transition to a lower form of care) doesn’t help the matter.

Modern medicine is a miracle but struggles to evolve beyond many immediate hurdles. In an extreme minority of cases it can be better to avoid traditional intake methods.

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