3 Comments »

Nick, you have raised a very important point in a very thoughtful way.

I spent the first 15 years of my career working in and around hospitals. The POV that you and Tony present is extremely innovative — but in my experience not at all representative of the majority of the hospital world.

Your suggestions of a focus on hospice care, prevention, childhood disease management are all in the right direction. But, these suggestions are not in the financial interests of the hospital under our current system. Hospitals make money by performing procedures and filling beds.

How do we get more hospitals to think like you?

How does one know when someone can’t be saved? There is a lot of waste in trying to save people that can’t be saved, but I think that many of the advances in medicine have come from doctors who didn’t believe that some subset of patients was unsaveable.

Rationally, I understand that we don’t have the money to do everything - that we have to save as many people-years as possible for a given amount of money/resources. People’s lives, however, are all that they know for certain that they have, and so people are loath to concede them without a fight. We don’t have the money to pay for the saving of our lives, but without our lives we (may) have nothing else.

Believe me, Robert, you will know.

Your comment

Name (required)

E-Mail (Required, not published )

Website

HTML-Tags:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>