The Next Big Disaster and Triage

zogger

Tue, 06 May 2008 19:48:51 PDT

A collaborative task force has just issued a detailed report outlining the recommended steps critical care health workers might need to take during a large health emergency, say a pandemic or natural disaster (or war for that matter, an "incident" perhaps). Given that today's health care system is already working more or less at capacity, any large scale national or regional disaster taxes resources beyond the ability to respond, to be everything for all comers. It just will not be possible. So, in essence, they outline who should live or die within the populations of sick or wounded people.
..""If a mass casualty critical care event were to occur tomorrow, many people with clinical conditions that are survivable under usual health care system conditions may have to forgo life-sustaining interventions owing to deficiencies in supply or staffing," the report states."

You can real the full report in HTML here "Definitive Care for the Critically Ill During a Disaster: A Framework for Optimizing Critical Care Surge Capacity"

Tue, 06 May 2008 20:44:45 PDT

I heard about this on the public radio a couple days ago and could only think, WTF?

Is it that they believe doctors and nurses are incapable of thinking on their feet when presented with an emergency or something?

Or more likely it's the Dept. of Homeland Terror doing what they do, keeping the sheeple to scared to peek out from under the covers and see what is really happening to this once great society.

Wed, 07 May 2008 09:14:35 PDT

I think it's even stupider than that- I think it's formalizing and publicizing the basic triage that would have happened bottom up anyway- as the waiting rooms in hospital emergency rooms become morgues.

Wed, 07 May 2008 13:28:42 PDT

Yeah, it's the "formalization" or institutionalization which is of serious concern. The shortage of providers, sure... but here with this kind of institutionalization we now have two problems. Because this kind of thing expands. It gets turned into provisioning policy. It gets turned into planning policy. It drifts, easily, into fascist machinations.

Evidently there are some asshat analysts in DHS with little better to do than project their sadistic fantasies into the civic order. I guess that isn't exactly news, though.

-t

Wed, 07 May 2008 17:33:23 PDT

I'd also point out that those who are horrified by this need- probably shouldn't be working in the health care sector.

While I hate to see it turn into the inevitable- regionalization where the big cities get all of the epidemic care and even realtively healthy people in the rural areas get nothing because they don't have the money to contribute to campaign funds- it IS what would have happened anyway on a small scale.

But I agree- it should be bottom up, not top down. The Principle of Double Effect is for individual moral choices, not institutional ones.