Hospital red tape makes casinos and airports better places to have a heart attack and survive! All due to a delay in providing an electic shock with a defribillator. The NYTimes article comments:
In the real world, doctors and nurses do not always run fast enough. Expert guidelines say the shock should be given within two minutes after the heart stops, but the study found that it took longer in 30 percent of the cases.
Certainly disappointing, but hospital guidelines that require a physician's presence at the time of defibrillation are not necessarily to blame. There's a purposeful hierarchy in hospitals that helps faculty and staff work together to make life and death decisions more effectively on the fly. But there's no question that staff can receive better training that can then help them distinguish when a physician's presence is absolutely required.
The article makes a great case for basic defribillator training that could prove true for many other technical functions performed in hospitals.
Dr. Saxon said the automatic defibrillators should be used more, along with the type of heart monitoring now given mostly to cardiac patients. Not everyone needs such monitoring, she said, but it may be in order for those who are very ill with kidney problems, diabetes or pneumonia, even if they have no history of heart problems. Their information would be transmitted to a computer network that would send out an alert if needed. In addition, she said, automatic defibrillators could be installed in every hospital room.
“You can get them for $500 on eBay,” she said. “It wouldn’t even take a nurse. You could train the cafeteria workers if you wanted to.”
So maybe, as in most strict bureacratic organizations, the hierarchy could benefit from being a little more flexible...