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I am a researcher studying diseases. You have no idea how many mice get killed without generating any data. There’s a rule in place whenever you want to work with animals that you need to plan ahead and only use as few animals as you need to get the data that you’re looking for. But things in research basically never happen according to plan. It could be due to a variety of factors: unexpected failures, overlooked factors, technical errors, or just simple negligence when performing an experiment. A lot of data and samples obtained from killed mice are discarded for one or more of the above reasons.
I get that mouse experiments are important to prove that our findings can translate to actual living animals, but I personally will not touch a mouse because, frankly, the “useful data per mouse” ratio is way too low for me to justify using mice.
I was in the field for years. A lot of the mice we had were maintained with one copy of the gene of interest and crossbred to produce experimental litters (there are a lot of reasons for it, some technical, some practical). But OMG the numbers of mice we went through just to maintain the lines. Forget about failed experiments etc.
but I personally will not touch a mouse because, frankly, the “useful data per mouse” ratio is way too low for me to justify using mice.
Are there any alternatives you work with, or do you abstain completely from those kinds of experiments?
Good question. You may be surprised to hear that my stance isn’t that uncommon in research. If I recall correctly, somewhere around 50% of researchers personally will not use mice in their experiments. In these cases, we would either use a lower lifeform (fish or fruit flies), or use immortalized cells. Immortalized cells are aggressive cancer cells that happen to retain some of their cell properties. For instance, immortalized lung cells tend to act somewhat like actual lung cells. It’s not a perfect model, since you’re experimenting on cancer cells instead of actual cells, but the ease and low cost of growing and using them makes them extremely valuable for a lot of grindwork experiments, where you just need to burn through tons of different hypotheses quickly.
For me, I prefer to use immortalized cells. It works out for me anyways, since I prefer to focus on the mechanism of disease (which tends to be easier on immortalized cells) rather than practical effects of disease (which tends to require animals).
That’s very informative! Thank you!
While you didn’t get the data you were looking for, at least in many of those cases you mentioned you did identify a flaw or failure and learned how to design an experiment that does.
I wouldn’t consider those mice as dieing without teaching you something. It might be a failed experiment, but you learned something.
I may be misreading them but it sounds like they’re describing avoidable problems.
Like when we were doing “oral” vaccinations with a oral gavage needle (ball tip) and going through the mouth and dosing in the stomach. We had a vial of 70% alcohol to clean the tip. Accidentally drew the alcohol up instead of the vaccine. By the time we finished the cage (6 mice, I think) the first one fell over.
This pertains to the US:
A lot of people are unaware of cancelation lists, and a lot of providers don’t really advertise that. When I was a casemanager for adults with severe mental illness, I would always ask to have my clients added to the cancelation list, and this would often get them in much sooner.
Also butted heads with a receptionist last year when my client was literally experiencing congestive heartfailure and she wanted to schedule him like 1.5 months out to see his specialist about having a defibrillator implanted. I said it was unacceptable and said he needed to be added to the emergency openings I know the providers reserve. She got a look on her face and said “But I need to get provider approval for that…” I told her “I think you better talk to the doctor then.”
Specialist eventually came over to scheduling and asked what was going on. The receptionist said what we wanted and asked if she would approve it, with a real dismissing inflection. The specialist said “Oh my god, yeah of course he’s approved for the emergency list…”
Some of these things are just so overlooked/unknown by the general public. And sometimes you’ve got to be assertive and stick with your guns to be treated fairly and get the attention you deserve. Especially now more than ever. Our healthcare system was bad before, but it’s been so strained ever since covid…
The healthcare system can be a nightmare for average people functioning well. It is so much worse for the population experiencing severe mental illness/with cognitive disability. This barrier for care plays a significant role in the reduced life expectancy in the disadvantaged population I worked with.
Patients suffering from severe mental disorders, including schizophrenia, major depression and bipolar disorders, have a reduced life expectancy compared to the general population of up to 10–25 years. This mortality gap requires urgent actions from a public health perspective in order to be reduced. Source
If anyone reading this has family or friends with severe mental illness or trouble with intellectual functioning, you may want to offer some support for doctors appointments. Honestly, everyone would benefit from having another person in their appointments for support and as a second set of ears.
Anyone reading this with severe mental illness, don’t be afraid to reach out for support. If you don’t have a social support system, there are services out there to help. Try to find social services in your area to get some help navigating thru all the bullshit. And don’t give up hope.
Always like to share this website with free evidence-based resources that I used all the time with my clients. I personally benefitted from the material as well.
Reduced mental function definitely includes dementia; my mom had Parkinson’s disease and definitely needed my help and advocacy and memory.
Also butted heads with a receptionist last year when my client was literally experiencing congestive heartfailure and she wanted to schedule him like 1.5 months out to see his specialist about having a defibrillator implanted. I said it was unacceptable and said he needed to be added to the emergency openings I know the providers reserve. She got a look on her face and said “But I need to get provider approval for that…” I told her “I think you better talk to the doctor then.”
Specialist eventually came over to scheduling and asked what was going on. The receptionist said what we wanted and asked if she would approve it, with a real dismissing inflection. The specialist said “Oh my god, yeah of course he’s approved for the emergency list…”
I’m not sure I understand what happened here. Was this all just because the receptionist didn’t want to ask for approval because it seemed like a hassle?
Yep… at least that was my guess. Didn’t want to pull the specialist back out of what she was then doing/didn’t want the hassle. But I was adamant that we weren’t going anywhere until she checked.
Some people are just finicky and I can’t really say for sure what her deal was, but her demeanor was just rude and like she didn’t have the time of day to give us…
What a fucking bizarre attitude to have when working in healthcare. Laziness in that area can cause deaths.
It’s more prevalent in the industry than you’d like to think… Burnout is often linked with lack of empathy.
I worked exclusively with adults whose illness was severe enough that they were residing in various residential care facilities (RCFs) and assisted living facilities (ALFs) in my region.
I was a 3rd party and a mandated reporter and I can’t tell you how many times I hotlined facilities and did internal/DMH/DHSS reporting/assistance with investigations. Misallocation of Client funds was a common problem (especially at specific RCFs), medication errors/stealing Residents’ meds, neglect of facilities/cleaning, improper nutrition, and abuse and neglect were all too common…
At first I thought the same thing when I started that position, wondering why someone like that would even take those positions. But people are complicated and often shitty. Some people like to power trip, some people want to take advantage of the disadvantaged, some people’s self-care is so neglected by being over-worked that they no longer have the capacity, and some people are just assholes…
This just makes me sad. :(
There’s so much wrong with the system and so much that could done to improve it, but I don’t want to frame it here in a hopeless sort of way. Our treatment options and accessibility continue to improve, social stigma of mental illness has improved tremously in the last decade or two, and there’s no reason to think further advancement won’t continue. But acknowledging the current shortcomings and feeling sad and angry about it are important to drive that positive change.
I’m in total agreement. What we need is fully nationalised healthcare, with direct political participation from the people.
That replacement infrastructure being installed in your area was PE stamped decades ago. It is quite possible he/she who did it has died at this point. All the mistakes they made are still in there and getting replicated with each upgrade. If anyone tries to fix anything it will be an uphill battle. Parts are specified that don’t exist so without eBay nothing would get shipped.
The person managing the project is in sales and their degree is probably in English Lit. Sometimes you get lucky and it is a construction worker. Their boss is the mayor’s nephew and has the contract because of a rule that stuff used in local area must go through a local company. An example: a replacement part that we sold last month was for 2,200 dollars. The local company charged 11,500 for doing nothing except repackaging the part. A big fuck you to the Arizona tax payer.
All your infrastructure is using way more electricity than it needs. We can’t get anyone to shift over to more efficient systems because that would involve effort on their part. We also can’t get them to upgrade the service, instead we just have to find by trial-and-error what parts can deal with under voltage. Code has to be designed to deal with the frequent brownouts because no one wants to pay for a generator. Speaking of code the number of times I am asked to give people a printout of code is much higher than you would expect.
Global warming is ripping us a new one. Everything is flooding that shouldn’t be flooding plus heat is everywhere. Waterproofing and heat upgrades are taking time because the original specs have to be updated. Which can’t happen because they don’t want to get the PE in to stamp it. Because that would make the project cost more eating into sales.
In short everything keeping you alive. Your water, garbage/recycling systems, sewage, trains, traffic signals, and roads was designed by better minds who are now dead. Everything now is a mixture of nepotism and short term self-interest trying to blindly copy what didn’t even work that well to begin with under new conditions. If you want a job for life go work in infrastructure, if you want to be happy with your life go work in anything else.
Oh you might be wondering how is it we all haven’t died from choleria and rabies infected garbage rats by now. The answer is simple. The very lowest paid people, the operators and maintenance crews, are actually good at what they do. Perfect? Hell no, however they get the job done. Which you wouldn’t know given how hard the government is working to cut their pensions and not increase their salaries but there it is.
Not sure how secret it is, but in many states your credit score can be used as a rating factor in determining your auto insurance premium. Insurance companies charge you more if you have bad credit.
Cars produce more harmful airbourne pollutants from their brakes than they do from the tailpipe. Copper is being phased out and the ultimate goal is to abandon friction braking entirely in favour of electrical regeneration.
Software Engineering. Most software is basically just houses of cards, developed quickly and not maintained properly (to save money ofc). We will see some serious software collapses within our lifetime.
As an everyday user of software who’s not a developer, this is not a secret. Nothing works well for any extended period of time.
Because it fit into an ecosystem of tech that is constantly evolving. Software as a whole evolves more quickly than most tech. You see the same effect in every other branch of engineering but just slower.
Example: They are having problems rebuilding a certain famous church in Europe that burned down because the trees that went into it are now all smaller. They can’t get a replacement part.
I just dealt with this about a month ago at work. A customer machine died and they wanted “an exact replacement”. I explained to sales that is all I need to hear to know this project is going to be a disaster. Parts go out of stock, the network stuff is not as backwards compatible as people think it is, and standards change. They went over my head and demanded the same machine. I get daily emails from our fabricators about the problems they are having. Engineering is not a once and done thing. You need to have the staff and resources to continue to make your product match up with the environment it is in.
We will see some serious software collapses within our lifetime.
We pretty much read about them at least once a week.
In the news this week: https://publicapps.caa.co.uk/docs/33/NERL Major Incident Investigation Preliminary Report.pdf
This is unprecedented since, well, January: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_FAA_system_outage
Then you start off fresh going “this time it’s going to be different” but the same fucking things happen and you end up cramming that project in 3 weeks.
Are there currently any that are showing signs of imminent collapse? (Twitter, maybe?).
Or what are the signs to look for those who are untrained in this field?
Regarding Twitter: yes.
As a tech person outside Twitter, looking in: Twitter is metaphorically a huge airliner with one remaining engine, and that engine is pouring smoke.
The clown who caused the first four engines to fail has stepped out of the pilot’s seat, but still has the ability to fire the new pilot, and still has strong convictions on how to fly a plane.
That plane might land safely. But in the tech community, those of us fortunate not to be affected are watching with popcorn, because we expect a spectacular crash.
If anyone reading this is still relying on Twitter - uh, my advice is to start a Mastodon account. Or Myspace or something.
I can’t imagine the shit show it would be if that log4j vulnerability and software update hit Twitter in its current state. I could see shutting off all external web traffic until the overworked devs finish committing while being held up with a visa loaded gun pointed at their head.
Mostly tge first sign is something like all old .doc files can no longer be opened. So some thing like.
Is a website running on WordPress? That’s a system built on failed practices and is constantly attacked. It needs a serious overhauling and possibly replacement, but the software runs a huge majority of websites.
While most instances of WordPress you we’ll find in the wild are insecure and nothing more than bloated garbage. The CMS is actually fairly secure with minimal intervention if you properly configure it on setup and maintain software updates as they continually roll out patches for vulnerabilities as they are discovered.
If you turn off comments and the ability for new users to self-register and throw it on PHP 8.2 with a WAF and enable file write protection it’s actually very robust.
At least when WordPress breaks you have WP-CLI to troubleshoot it
I work for a web hosting company. So many WP sites are out of date with plugins and core. I’ve dealt with many compromised sites. Granted there are auto updates on the WP side and the hosts service, it’s still pretty often.
I also work for a WH. Yeah most idiots don’t do basic maintenance which is why I just rename the dir as xxx.old make a new folder install core and then delete the blank wp-content an copy over the wp-content DB and wp-config.php from the borked install. Takes 10 min rather than 30 to update and fix. I call that the “Doctor Frankenstein” method
Y2038 is my “retirement plan”.
(Y2K, i.e. the “year 2000 problem”, affected two digit date formats. Nothing bad happened, but consensus nowadays is that that wasn’t because the issue was overblown, it’s because the issue was recognized and seriously addressed. Lots of already retired or soon retiring programmers came back to fix stuff in ancient software and made bank. In 2038, another very common date format will break. I’d say it’s much more common than 2 digit dates, but 2 digit dates may have been more common in 1985. It’s going to require a massive remediation effort and I hope AI-assisted static analysis will be viable enough to help us by then.)
I am taking the week off, family camping, and cell phones off for that week in 2038.
How many UNIX machines in production are still running on machines with 32-bit words, or using a 32-bit time_t?
How much software is still running 32 bit binaries that won’t be recompiled because the source code has been lost together with the build instructions, the compiler, and the guy who knew how it worked?
How much software is using int32 instead of time_t, then casting/converting in various creative ways?
How many protocols, serialization formats and structs have 32 bit fields?
Irrelevant. The question you should ask instead is: how many of those things will still be in use in 15 years.
Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and OSX have all already switched to 64 bit time.
So they have a year 202020 bug then
I get the joke, but for those seriously wondering:
The epoch is Jan 1, 1970. Time uses a signed integer, so you can express up to 2^31 seconds with 32 bits or 2^63 with 64 bits.
A normal year has exactly 31536000 seconds (even if it is a leap second year, as those are ignored for Unix time). 97 out of 400 years are leap years, adding an average of 0.2425 days or 20952 seconds per year, for an average of 31556952 seconds.
That gives slightly over 68 years for 32 bit time, putting us at 1970+68 = 2038. For 64 bit time, it’s 292,277,024,627 years. However, some 64 bit time formats use milliseconds, microseconds, 100 nanosecond units, or nanoseconds, giving us “only” about 292 million years, 292,277 years, 29,228 years, or 292 years. Assuming they use the same epoch, nano-time 64 bit time values will become a problem some time in 2262. Even if they use 1900, an end date in 2192 makes them a bad retirement plan for anyone currently alive.
Most importantly though, these representations are reasonably rare, so I’d expect this to be a much smaller issue, even if we haven’t managed to replace ourselves by AI by then.
Omg we are in same epoch as the butlarian crusade.
Butlarian crusade
Butlerian Jihad, my dude. Hate to correct you, but the spice must flow.
If you’re going to correct people about Dune quotes, at least use one from the book! “The spice must flow” doesn’t appear in any of them, it’s a Lynch addition.
Im just glad you got that reference
an end date in 2192 makes them a bad retirement plan for anyone currently alive.
I can’t wait to retire when I’m 208 years old.
Tell that to the custom binary serialization formats that all the applications are using.
Edit: and the long-calcified protocols that embed it.
Cars haven’t. A whole lot of cars are gonna get bricked.
What is the basis for the 2038 problem?
The most common date format used internally is “seconds since January 1st, 1970”.
In early 2038, the number of seconds will reach 2^31 which is the biggest number that fits in a certain (also very common) data type. Numbers bigger than that will be interpreted as negative, so instead of January 2038 it will be in December 1901 or so.
so instead of January 2038 it will be in December 1901…
Maybe this is just a big elaborate time travel experiment 68 years in the making?
Huh interesting. Why 2^31? I thought it was done in things like 2^32. We could have pushed this to 2106.
Signed integers. The number indeed goes to 2^32 but the second half is reserved for negative numbers.
With 8 bit numbers for simplicity:
0 means 0.
127 means 127 (last number before 2^(7)).
128 means -128.
255 means -1.Why not just use unsigned int rather than signed int? We rarely have to store times before 1970 in computers and when we do we can just use a different format.
Because that’s how it was initially defined. I’m sure plenty of places use unsigned, which means it might either work correctly for another 68 years… or break because it gets converted to a 32 bit signed somewhere.
My dad is a tech in the telecommunications industry. We basically didn’t see him for all of 1999. The fact that nothing happened is because of people working their assess off.
My dad still believes the entire Y2K problem was a scam. How do I convince him?
Maybe a documentary from some folks who worked on that stuff? I imagine a short documentary exists on YouTube, or at least an interview on a podcast from someone who did it.
If he won’t believe it then, not sure what else you can do. Some people are just stuck in their old ways and beliefs despite any evidence you provide.
Even more difficult in a situation like this because it wasn’t widely publicized until years after. I didn’t even know this stuff until a few years ago, but I work with computers so I believe it partly because of what I know about computer architecture.
Maybe he’ll believe it if he understands how 2038 affects Linux OS and can see it in real time then?
Well my dad does too and he worked his ass off to prevent it. Baby boomers are just stupid as shit, there’s not really much you can do.
My dad had to stay in his office with a satellite phone over new years in case shit hit the fan.
Package management is impossible. When a big enough package pushes an update the house of cards eill fall. This causes project packages with greatly outdated versions to exist in production because there is no budget to diagnose and replace packages that are no longer available when a dependency requires a change.
Examples: adminJs or admin bro… one of them. Switched the package used to render rich text fields.
React-scripts or is it create react app, I don’t recall. Back end packages no long work as is on the front end. Or something like that? On huge projects, who’s got the budget to address this to get the project up to date?
This has to be a world wide thing. There is way to many moving targets for every company to have all packages up to date.
It’s only a matter of time before an exploit of some sort is found and who knows what happens from there.
That’s basically what happened with log4j or whatever that java bug was a few years ago. A lot of things still haven’t been patched.
Does leftpad count as a collapse?
Neurodiagnostic tech here. There is barely any sort of government regulation around neurodiagnostics in general. You can hire a kid out of high school to do our job as long as they take a basic life support class. Often times we’re doing work that has major impacts on the patient’s future, whether that’s preparation for epilepsy surgery, determination of brain death, or just quantification and classification of seizures in very sick patients in the ICU. However the Texas state Senate decided that arguing about where someone should be allowed to pee was more important than licensure for neurodiagnostics.
However the Texas state Senate decided that arguing about where someone should be allowed to pee was more important than licensure for neurodiagnostics.
The avarege conservative’s monkey brain won’t vote for something that makes actual sense. They’ll only vote for some ideological religios bs no one else cares about.
Loading animations on websites and some apps that give you a percentage and messages about what’s going on are usually faked with animations. The frontend for things like that usually just puts fake messages and animations because it’s not easy to track the stages of complex steps happening on the backend. It’s possible in some cases but I don’t think I have ever seen a real working version of a loader like that in my 15 years of experience.
When your favorite band cancels their gig because the lead singer has “come down with the flu”, that’s industry code for “got too wasted, and is currently too busy getting alcohol and possibly drugs out of their system to perform”.
I even worked one show that had to end after 20 minutes because one guy in the band was visibly under the influence, refused to play, talked to his hallucinations, then spent a few minutes talking to the audience about how his foot was evil and wanted to kill him, before the tour manager could drag him off stage. Then he tried to assault several backstage staff for not allowing him to cut off his foot. This was on a tour that promoted alcohol free rockshows btw, so we didn’t provide alcohol to the artists backstage. God knows what he might’ve purchased from our local street dealers lol.
The next day in the papers, the headline says “[the band] cancels first week of reunion tour after flu outbreak” 🙃 Yes, of course
As a paramedic, if you can’t remember your name, address, and social security number, we’ll take you to the hospital but you probably won’t get a bill. Unless you tell the hospital, then we’ll get a face sheet. Stay Safe, John and Jane Doe.
The SLA on any product is not a guarantee the platform will be fixed in that timeframe. At best it is wishful thinking.
Sla is?
Service level agreement
Service Level Agreement, typically a legal contractual requirement. SLAs can vary, but a common one is for a service to be online and accessible. Web hosting providers that host web sites for companies typically guarantee that their service has an SLA of 99.5% uptime, meaning any time the service is down, the engineers and incident teams need to restore operational services quickly. A breach of SLA invokes financial penalty to the provider for violating the contract uptime guarantee.
With most pre-written SLAs, the penalty is something like “we’ll refund the service cost for the month” at best. So it’s “we have a financial reason not to fuck up” not “you will be made whole if we fuck up and your business is down”.
The SLAs are also often tied to SLOs (the quality they promise to deliver, e.g. “we promise to be up 99.5% of the time”) that are very generous for the service provider. If your critical service was down 3.6 hours in a month, that would still meet a 99.5% SLO. So if your business was down for 2-3 hours per month, that would be a-ok. Only if it was down for say an entire day, you’d get (depending on the contract) typically either a day or a month of service refunded.
I’d take a provider with no SLO but a good track record over someone that offers an SLA. If they fuck up the month of refund is going to be the least of my problems, and if they fuck up repeatedly, I’ll have to emergency-migrate away to a different provider either way.
I’ve consulted with many companies trying to save money by moving to AWS because they have twelve 9s of availability. They don’t do any redundant deployments because they want to save money.
I keep telling them that the SLA just means that AWS will give them a refund for anything you couldn’t use while they have an outage. There’s no guarantee.
So they just treat their uptime target sorta like the office and bankruptcy? “I declare 12 9s!”
Like, bruh, you actually have to pay for that if you want it, wtf?
I guess it is a bit like car batteries. A 4 year warranty doesn’t guarantee it will last 4 years, it means you get a refund if it doesn’t. (Though unless they’re idiots they build the batteries so statistically it is somewhat more common to last that long vs dying early).
SLAs are not a guarantee because a guarantee is a guarantee .
Sounds about right lol.
But that’s why you put SLAs into contract language with penalties. Like, say my company pays your company for a SaaS product. And you go down longer than the SLA, we get a discount or something. If it’s not in a legal agreement it is meaningless for sure.
Also the refund is not automatic you need to apply for it.
Ok? I never said it was nor would I expect it to be unless it is part of the contract. And even then probably not.
Phone systems that give you the prompt, “Press # for more options” etc are called Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems. If you encounter an IVR that asks for credit card info, social security number, etc, don’t enter it in! If you stay silent, you will usually be routed to an agent, though that varies on whichever system you are calling into.
Even if the system is designed for completely non-nefarious purposes, the IT people who maintain the phone system can analyze call logs to pull electronic keypresses (DTMF) and reconstruct every digit entered to capture your data. Most IT people would never consider abusing this access, but some organizations contract or sub-contract their phone support out to the lowest bidding third parties and might not do a great job of vetting their techs.
Giving this information to a live agent has its own risks, but if you initiated a call to a documented telephone number for the organization you are trying to reach, it is generally a safer option than keying in sensitive digit strings to an IVR. It is much harder for anyone outside of the call center to scan recorded audio for information like this. (Though technology is closing that gap)
The bread you are given to at the restaurant is of often recycled from leftovers at previous tables.
Taking an ambulance to the ER does not ensure that you will be seen faster. A decent chunk of ambulance patients go right out to the lobby to wait like everyone else because everyone is triaged based on their illness or injury, not their mode of transportation.
Isn’t this just an expected correlation? Most people who take an ambulance to the E.R. will be seen quicker because most people who are in an ambulance have an emergency so they have a a reason to be seen quicker.
Definitely not true.
There are a lot of people who call ambulances for inane, non-emergency bullshit. I’ve seen people come in by ambulance for minor complaints that have been ongoing for months or even years.
I have several medical family members. Yup thats right. Mister snow globe in the butt will have to have
This is fact. And to add to this, its actually better and you will be seen quicker if you drive/have someone drive you to the hospital if you are gunshot or have a major stab wound. The chances of survival are much better then waiting for an ambulance. And if you are in that situation, speed as fast as you safely can. IF you get pulled over make sure the cop knows the situation so they can escort you to the hospital.
This is VERY country specific. In some countries ambulances focus on fast transport with minimal care in the ambulance (IIRC this is the case in the US), elsewhere they can provide significant first aid while on the way. If it takes you 15 minutes to the hospital and the ambulance needs 10 to get to you and 10 to the hospital, you’ll be at the hospital 5 minutes later but will receive care 5 minutes sooner.
In Germany the ambulance will have what I think would be equivalent to one EMT-B and one paramedic, but a emergency physician may be brought to the scene with a separate car.
Here we have different ambulances for different use cases and locations. For example, in the city, they will mostly have those sleek fast ambulances and in rural areas, they use more boxy ambulances with more capabilities.
American ambulances are usually an EMT and a Paramedic that can start some pretty advanced care en route. Paramedics can intubate, defibrillate, and give medications on their own authority or with clearance from the EMS medical director.
Eh, for some significant trauma, the ambulance is better because they know which hospitals are equipped for the emergency in question and which hospitals have resuscitation or trauma bays open. They call ahead too which also allows for the ER staff to prepare and have people standing by to receive you.
(I worked at a #1 trauma center for 16 years)
I was just stating what is the “public secret” and there is a lot of studies to back it
https://hub.jhu.edu/2017/09/20/emergency-transport-survival-rates-study-hopkins/
I could provide more links but those are the first couple from sites that I would trust
I have also worked at a Level 1 Trauma hospital, and I think it depends on the distance from the hospital and the degree of specialty care needed. Also, since Covid, there have been more and more staffing and capacity problems in ERs. Taking a critical patient to an ER with no available resus bays that is also boarding ICU patients due to a lack of ICU staffing is going to be less effective and less safe than going the extra distance to a hospital that does have the capacity to care for the patient. Studies from before 2020 are just not relevant anymore.
Why would anyone even think that?
Because I’ve literally been told that by hospital staff (in Germany). This may vary by country.
Interesting, now I wonder if our ambulances even carry people for bullshit reasons, if they don’t, it’d make sense that those are always actual emergencies.
Wishful thinking? Entitlement? Main character syndrome? Some kind of nonsense.
Well see ambulance is faster than walking so you advance in the line faster. Makes sense
I mean I’ve gone to countless common cold and knee-pain gigs during my time as a responder. It’s insane from what people call help for and what they think ambulances do. One guy attacked us when we couldn’t cure his flu on the spot
17 years ago on a Saturday night, just before bedtime, my 4yo son was being a dufus and managed to break his collarbone. Before we knew it was broken (but knew something was obviously wrong) I took him to the emergency room. We were stuck waiting about 6 hours to be seen. The nurse that triaged us was extremely apologetic and literally stated “I’m so sorry you’ve had to wait so long, we’re stuck having to see the drunken scraped knees first just because they came in an ambulance.”
I’m assuming that if my son were bleeding out he would be seen faster, but I’ve assumed that in non-life threatening situations that ambulances receive priority.
Where was this
Illinois, one of the Chicago suburbs.
Interesting, which country was that?
United States, medium sized hospital in the Chicago suburbs.
It’s still strikes me as weird seeing billboards with live ER wait times advertised. It seems counterintuitive. And ER is for emergencies. If it’s an emergency it doesn’t matter what the wait time is. It’s not like you’re picking and choosing. But clearly people do. And then hospitals advertise their live ER wait times on a billboard, they want people to come to the emergency room now? I just don’t understand it
In a true emergency, there is no wait time.
I don’t understand it either. I think it’s usually the corporate owned and run ERs that have those billboards and the community hospital ERs just triage people as they come and offer no guarantees about wait times.
Dad was a lab tech at a hospital that gad the wait time. The only people who cared where upper management since it is a good advertisements
A broken arm sucks ass but an extra half an hour drive to get seen 2 hours sooner seems like a good trade.
I’ve worked in ERs where on a really busy night patients with chest pain and a cardiac history that came in by ambulance went out to the lobby because their EKG was mostly okay and literally the only room open was the resuscitation bay. We kept checking on him in the lobby and did repeat EKGs until a room was available, but if there’s not space and they’re not dying, they’ll just have to wait.
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