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Comment by hello_computer | Hacker News Reader

Not so sure about that. According to a few studies, medical error is the 3rd leading cause of death, behind heart disease and cancer.

Many operations are elective. In such cases, having a tired surgeon or nurse may be worse than delaying the procedure, or even skipping it.

https://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i2139

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28186008/

https://journals.lww.com/journalpatientsafety/Fulltext/2013/...

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This has been extensively debunked. Read the original methods of the BMJ article that you linked. They took every single minor error, like prescribing medicine 15 minutes late, and if the patient died, even of an aggressive cancer that they had already, it would be counted in the 'medical error that caused the death' statistic.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/16/upshot/death-by-medical-e...

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/863788?scode=msp&st=fpf...

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/medical-errors-2020/

Of course practicing doctors and nurses are going to swear up and down that it isn't true. They are the perpetrators. Ask any person who has had to spend time in a hospital recently, and watch your "de-bunked" turn back into a "re-bunked." These jokers can't even keep the charts straight. It is fast-food-tier service for a life-and-death commodity.

…but if you postpone a procedure, the medical facility they work at isn’t able to keep up with their revenue targets.

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