I fully agree. Life is the time that we spend in this world - let's measure it in terms of time and do a cost effective analysis:
- As stated yesterday, the average delay is 6 hours.
- During this period, a patient needs to stay in the ward and wait. This is the duration of life that is consumed. (Let's take aside the humanistic cost of suffering. I also try my best and used the word consumed rather than wasted.)
- We admit 60 patients each day, and 40% of them need antibiotics. In other words, 6 days of human life is consumed for each effective day of the policy.
- Let's assume the average life expectancy of a patient admitted to our hospital and required antibiotic treatment is 15 years. (Given the age and prevalence of multiple diseases, this is probably a slightly optimistic number.)
- The inevitable conclusion is: The policy would only achieve zero balance on its cost to human life if it could avoid one death in every two-and-a-half years.
PS. Our case is, in fact, the classical scenario of hidden social cost. No one dies of the policy that seemingly saves lives, but everyone pays part of his time.
And time - in aggregate - is life.
1 comment:
No, the managers use a different formula.
One antibiotic incident and patient died = news headline => poor management
While no bed for admission and people died => poor resource (not-my-fault)
The " price " to pay for poor management must be >>> poor resource
If you are manager, you should go for "poor resource" too, because the price is lower
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