I once worked at a hospital where the nurses on the floors would start IVs for patients headed to surgery. If they had trouble getting an IV, they would keep on trying until they had trashed or blown every vein the patient had before quitting and sending the patient to the OR. The patients they were successful in getting an IV on ended up having an IV infiltration rate of almost 50%. We in the OR complained about this to the head nurses and middle management of course. There was never any meeting of the minds on this issue, which directly affected patient care. We, in the OR, would have been happy to retrain the floor nurses to become more proficient at starting IVs. This would have helped out everyone, especially the patients, but alas, it never came to pass. The patients continued to come the OR with infiltrated IVs, or come to the OR with 12 bandaids on the failed attempts at gaining IV access. This would necessitate the patient getting a central line for IV access many times. We kept complaining. The nurses on the floor never got any training or got any better at starting IVs.
Finally, one genius nurse manager came up with an answer to the problem. An answer that got the OR team to quit complaining to the powers that be about the problem. They simply Heplocked all IV starts. That way you couldn’t tell the IV wasn’t working until the patient got fairly far along on the path to getting surgery. This answer may have looked better on paper and stopped some of the complaining, however it did nothing at all to improve patient care one bit.
It is much the same for improving airline safety by creating the TSA. A lot of money is being spent, a lot of people (travelers) are being inconvenienced, lots of stuff is being done, a lot of people have airport security jobs, lots of wheels are turning. But how much safer are we really than 1 or 2 decades ago. I believe that despite all the money spent and hoopla, there is no statistical difference in the safety of American airports.
Greed 