This is how, in a pandemic, those who are treated medically and those who are not treated will be chosen: AP story.
Triage is tough. Medical professionals do it every day, and to the layperson it probably sounds horrifying.
Many decisions are hard to make. And some just aren't.
I'm not an uncaring person. When the pandemic finally comes, SARS or avian flu or whatever, I will work the overtime at the hospital. I've been one of the people who did the overtime through three blizzards, sleeping (or not) at the hospital during the days. I remember one day I took care of sixteen quad- and paraplegics for a sixteen hour shift, with my partner, who did the other sixteen.
I'm willing to do that when a crisis happens, like millions of other nurses are. We are caring people. I love the geriatric population; I knew I wanted to work with older people from the start of nursing school for me. I hated my ped's rotation. But in a triage situation, and all other things are equal? I'm gonna treat the 10 year old in respiratory distress before I get to the 70 year old in respiatory distress. I think we're hard-wired as a species for some decisions.
It might not be a bad idea for the public to know that, though.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
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1 comments:
Wow, that's really interesting--thanks for sharing it. I think you're right. It's not pleasant, but people will make decisions like that. While I'm not surprised, I am nonetheless a bit floored by the comment about "age discrimination." I do take the point about poor people being more likely to be in poor health, which is unacceptable.
I remember when I took my anthropology classes and we talked about aging folks and at-risk babies in primitive cultures. A lot of us had a hard time wrapping our brains around decisions that people have to make when survival is at stake, not just for the individual but for the society.
We just went through pandemic flu planning at work, and it was fascinating how people had a hard time comprehending what the disaster might look like, how it would impact us, and what we needed to do as people and as employees with responsibilities. Obviously, we're not dealing directly with patient care, but we've got medical staff depending on at least some of our services. It was equally hard for the folks who run the really critical services (power, emergency services, security) to grasp that programmers might not feel an overriding obligation to come to work if there's a pandemic going on.
I recently read The American Plague. If anyone needs a reminder about how devastating disease can be to an entire community, they should read the first few chapters.
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