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Flaw In Emergency Response System May Have Killed Hundreds
Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that a flaw in the way emergency response software was set up to handle Category A responses in Great Britain may have cost hundreds of lives over the past ten years. Most ambulance services use an international computerized system designed in America and in the US version, a fall of more than 6 feet receives the maximum priority response. However, the government committee which governs its use in Great Britain decided that such cases should be deemed less urgent, and excluded from an eight minute category A target response time. If a call involved a fall of more than 6 feet it was designated a lower priority 'category B response' despite the presence of life-threatening conditions which were supposed to receive the most urgent category A response. The flaw came to light after Bonnie Mason, 58, fell 12 feet down the stairs and died from a head injury after emergency controllers in Suffolk failed to identify her situation as 'life-threatening.'"
The system itself wasn't flawed, but rather whoever set it up decided that they should be category B. The system did exactly what it was told, it just was told to do something different than in the US, and something that was later deemed to be suboptimal.
How is this a flaw in the Emergency Response System if the change initiated by a government committee is how the incidents were classified wrongly?
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It seems that the software downgraded to category B if the fall was larger than 6 feet regardless of other (category A) factors.
e.g., the patient has been shot and stabbed and drowned and fell 8 feet so it's a category B now.
That is a fault in the software.
The summary sounds like "we underestimated how dangerous a medium distance fall can be
Obviously the committee didn't include anyone with medical training. I am a physician and we know that even falling your own height can produce life-threatening injuries. But of course why should a government committee do anything as mundane as seek professional medical advice?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I think that the comments I have read above me are missing the point, or maybe I am.
The software was changed so that falls of more than 6 feet no longer caused a case to be considered "category A", the problem is that (through a mistake when rewriting that bit of code I assume), mention of a fall was causing a case to be considered "category B" even if other things were present that would normally have made it "category A".
The British aren't really Europeans. Socially, they're much more like Americans than they are like those from the Continent.
You're right: it isn't a flaw in the software per se, and I would not assign any blame to those who developed it (as opposed to those who implemented it).
However, it is a predictable of administration, and the use of information technology is often integrated into systems in just this way. The idea that risk can be rationalized and reduced to a number (class A, class B, and so on) is itself potentially dangerous. Though it is not necessarily dangerous in any particular situation, it is nevertheless predictable that administrative or technical rationality would make this kind of outcome more common.
You see, the problem was not simply that the response categories were incorrect. The problem was that the system (including its operators, operating procedures, and so on) was too rigid, too rationalized, and therefore unable to respond to unexpected events:
This kind of event was clearly unexpected by the systems implementors. But even if they had assessed the danger of falls differently, there is likely some other event that would fall outside the systems parameters. (Most falls probably should be category B events, not category A.) That's why you want to have human judgement and human overrides.
Treating a system in terms of independent technical components has a number of benefits, including efficiency. That's what happened here. The process was rationally divided into tasks for the humans and tasks for the computer. Nice, neat, clean: and likely to produce outcomes like this.
This is not a issue with socialised medicine, Its an issue with bureaucrats not listening to the experts. Same kind of thing would happen if medical care was completely privatised.
And yet, the 'rationed' socialist healthcare here in Britain is still a metric fuckton better than what you get in the US.
There is an important lesson to be learned- some people really are so stupid that they'll believe ridiculous scaremongering rather than risk having to re-examine their exiting ideology.
The point is this: the software was written in the USA, and it murdered peaceful and enlightened Europeans.
The point is actually this: the software was written in the USA, but the Europeans had to go and dick with it thereby murdering the people that elected the retards who decided to perform the aforementioned dickery.
Caller: Please hurry!! He's fallen down a 30ft well! Can't you get here any faster!?
A&E Drone: *clackety clackety* ...... Computer say Nooooo....
Caller: Well then I'm going to get my gun and put him out of his misery.
/If that doesn't bump you up to the highest priority, nothing will.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
How strange. When I was living in the UK there always seemed to be some kid on TV looking for money to pay for them to fly to America to get treatment which they couldn't get under the rationed socialist NHS.
You see such cases on TV, because a person not getting the healthcare they need under a socialized healthcare system makes for a great story (= attracts viewers). When a person does get all the healthcare they need, it's system working as intended, which doesn't make a great story.
I mean, what exactly do you expect - daily headlines along the lines of "NHS provides heart surgery for patiena in need"?
Also, I wonder how many such cases are there in practice, in proportion to the total population count. Or, better yet, how many people die in UK vs US because of not receiving healthcare that they needed for any reason (waiting lists or unavailability in UK, inability to pay in US, etc). That would be a much more interesting statistic.
Clearly the coders or whoever set it up that way fucked up. And you had me until the anti-government rant. Driving any vehicle at high speeds comes with danger so there are good reasons to lower the category. (Hong Kong has only 1 category and stats show that this is a shitty plan). Likely that they modified the system based on new information, incredibly well-established facts aren't always true.
UK - "The most critical emergency calls, referred to as "Category A" calls, have a response time requirement of eight minutes and zero seconds, with a 75% compliance requirement, and the additional stipulation that 95% of these calls must be reached within 14 minutes in urban areas and 19 minutes in rural areas. "
US - "For life-threatening emer-gencies, providing a transport-capable unit within 8:59 with 90% reliability is the most common urban benchmark. Common rural and wilderness benchmarks are within 15/90% and 30/90%, respectively."
So, comparatively the two countries are similar in numbers. UK is arguably a bit behind, but if you've ever been to both cities it is obvious why. The US was designed for cars, the UK for people or carriages in many parts. In any-case it is insulting to say that they are behind due to government negligence. And this is just talking about ambulance response times, in many other metrics the UK is far far ahead with their socialized healthcare. So please refrain from the rhetoric. I think we can all agree we have enough of that already.
How strange. When I turn on the television, there always seems to be some American family who lost their house, had to declare bankruptcy and move in with friends or family after their greedy, captialist insurance provider dropped them because of a "pre-existing medical condition."
Well! There is somebody who believes the basic assumptions of an outdated economic dogma can be applied to all areas of life. Here are a few ideas to ponder over....
1. Do people and companies react in a sane rational way, especially when it comes to healthcare?
2. Are you aware that large free markets have been proven to be disconnected from what is called "the fundamentals"?
3. Is a person or company acting in what is in their best interest always acting in the interests of the whole community?
4. Have you ever heard of game theory or the prisoner's dilemma?
5. Can we expect everybody patients have access to all information, allowing them to act rationally, or will they be making decisions on incomplete information?
And for some more direct questions:
1. Would it not be in a hospital's best interest to only admit "nice and easy" cases, and turn away 'hard cases', to help their statistics look good?
2. Why do the foreign quacks selling Cancer treatments and fake stem cell therapies not go out of business?
3. Homeopathy still attracts dollars, even when it doesn't actually work. Why?
You need to read more advanced economic theory...