One of the more asinine things I’ve come across. Even more stunningly idiotic is this suggestion by the researchers:
Researchers asked doctors to estimate respiratory and pulse rates without looking at a second hand . . .. . . The researchers asked 20 appropriately trained staff to evaluate different pulse and respiratory rates on a simulated patient without the use of a second hand.
Estimates for a pulse rate of 83 ranged from 60 to 120, and estimates for a respiratory rate of 14 ranged from 10 to 28.
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Oh, Jesus H. Christ.
Just when you think it can’t get any sillier, these morons come up with something that has me reaching for a calendar, to make certain it’s not the first of April.
But, rather than actually cleaning the hospitals, washing bedsheets instead of flipping them (and how do they keep track of how many times they’re flipped) and enforcing handwashing, they come up with this nonsense.
And where will all the machinery Mr. Shalley will be using come from? The same hospital that can’t afford to light all the bulbs in the hallways? Wash the sheets? Where will the batteries for the devices come from?
And how soon will some religious group demand a waiver because they can’t have bare limbs – especially on women?
A resurgence of the pocket watch. Who’d a thunk it?
In my travels as a Locums, I once covered a Board-certified Pediatrician who proclaimed that he could estimate temperatures within 0.1 degree by touch – the reason he did not have working thermometers in the office.
I honored my (thankfully short) commitment (insisting that they fix the thermometer), and moved on.
Time to go back to the pocket watch?
I recently had the experience of anesthesia awareness (really) during major surgery because the CRNA let the sevo vaporizer run dry. It didn;t have an alarm. In recovery, after I stopped screaming, the CRNA admitted her mistake and blammed the lack of an alarm. I told her that I fly a plane with 5 fuel tanks and I use my $30 wristwatch to time them and they never run dry. I asked her why she didn’t do the same and she told me that she used to, but she got yelled at for wearing an alarm watch in the o.r., the beeping was annoying to some. This was a good answer; it kept me from sending her to surgery.
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