| ▲ | 2muchcoffeeman 4 hours ago | ||||||||||||||||||||||
This is very conspiratorial thinking. Do you really think that in a high stress situation you’re going to make the best decisions? Do you really think health workers are all concerned about legalities first? Not moving a patient unless you explicitly know how is probably right the vast majority of the time. Sometimes that’s wrong, but how are you going to get the entire public to understand what the right situation is? It’s so easy looking at a single case in hindsight. May we all have the ability to make the right choices all the time. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | wk_end 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||
It's not that health workers are always thinking about legality; it's that they're following policies either written by people thinking about legality or re-written by people in response to legality, i.e. they got sued and changed the policy in light of that. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | somenameforme 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||
> Do you really think health workers are all concerned about legalities first? 100%. Legal issues are a huge deal in healthcare. This is a snippet from a study [1] on the topic, just to get an idea of the scale (which I think most do not realize at all): --- Each year during the study period, 7.4% of all physicians had a malpractice claim, with 1.6% having a claim leading to a payment (i.e., 78% of all claims did not result in payments to claimants). The proportion of physicians facing a claim each year ranged from 19.1% in neurosurgery, 18.9% in thoracic–cardiovascular surgery, and 15.3% in general surgery to 5.2% in family medicine, 3.1% in pediatrics, and 2.6% in psychiatry. The mean indemnity payment was $274,887, and the median was $111,749. Mean payments ranged from $117,832 for dermatology to $520,923 for pediatrics. It was estimated that by the age of 65 years, 75% of physicians in low-risk specialties had faced a malpractice claim, as compared with 99% of physicians in high-risk specialties. --- I can give a very specific example of how legal issues play directly into behavior, and how it leads to antibiotic over-prescription. Antibiotics are obviously useless against viral infections but many, if not most, doctors will habitually describe them for viral infections anyhow. Why? Because a viral infection tends to leave your body more susceptible to bacterial infections. For instance a flu (viral) can very rarely lead to pneumonia (bacterial). And that person who then gets very sick from pneumonia can sue for malpractice. It's not malpractice because in the average case antibiotic prescription is not, at all, justified by the cost:benefit, but doctors do it anyhow to try to protect themselves from lawsuits. There have been studies demonstratively showing this as well, in that doctors who live in areas with less rampant malpractice lawsuits are less likely to prescribe antibiotics unless deemed necessary. Or if you have a friend/family in medicine you can simply ask them about this - it's not some fringe thing. [1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20250628065433/https://www.nejm.... | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | _drimzy 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||
> Do you really think that in a high stress situation you’re going to make the best decisions? I mean that statement could be used to excuse any mistake in any project/system ever made, and is mostly a cop out. Yes, the system is definitely designed to minimize legal risk for the health-workers/hospitals. A system is only as good as what it's' design objectives are, and if "save a life at all cost" was the objective the system might as well look entirely different. | |||||||||||||||||||||||