"Don't Fix what Ain't Broke"

Let's face it. There are many times that I've taken things apart to figure out how it worked, only to find that I couldn't put it back together and get it working again. Things that, until then, had worked completely fine. I chalked it up to a learning experience, promising myself that the next time I would get it right. As I got older, I found myself in this situation less often. Part of it was that I learned to stop taking mechanical pencils apart. The other part was that I found myself fixing things that were actually broken. And, having learned from past episodes, I now knew that when disassembling, remembering the order in which parts are removed is probably the most important thing to do. Having graduated from college and not only fixed broken things, but developed new, improved products, I find myself returning to memories of pencil lead and mechanical pencil parts lying on my wooden desk while my 2nd grader self, fingers smudged with graphite, tried in vain to get it working again.

I was recently reminded that my eagerness to develop new technology and "improve" the quality of care in our hospitals might lead me to make the same mistake, but on a bigger scale. I volunteer at a local hospital's emergency room, and the techs and nurses are all really great. They care about their patients. They are friendly. They know their stuff. (The docs are also great, but not the focus of this particular post.) I was thinking as I watched them place countless IVs that it would be cool to make a robot that does this for them. Save them time and effort, allowing them to do other things. However, when I mentioned this to Sally*, she said, "Oh no, don't do that. It would leave me without a job." I hadn't thought about that. I'm not one to deliberately avoid developing new technology just for the sake of saving someone's job. However, I also realize that there would be additional risks associated with designing a robot that can start an IV, depending on how they are utilized. If the robot goes from patient to patient on its own based off of a queue controlled by triage, there are so many things that it would miss. A trained nurse or tech upon walking into a room is instantly conscious of so many things. The slightly abnormal coloring of a 2-month old infant. The alertness, or lack thereof, of a patient. The likelihood of a very much drunk 20-something to wander out of his room in search of shoes and wallet. Most importantly, nurses and techs know how to handle patient interactions way better than robots can. Or at least that was the case when I last checked.

How do you get the cantankerous 70-something Alzheimer's patient to allow you to stick a needle in her? There's lots of coaxing to be done, especially since she is somehow mistakenly convinced that these healthcare professionals in blue scrubs and nitrile gloves are "clumsy shoemakers" who are out to hurt her. (I have no idea how she got it into her head that they were shoemakers. It is all that I can do to keep from laughing, though it wasn't funny in the least bit at the time.) Once you have her permission, it's not like it gets any easier. Her veins are fragile and slippery, ready to collapse as you attempt to collect the blood samples before flushing with saline and starting the drip. Throughout this process, the tech continues to attempt to distract her, asking her questions. That's where the skills come in, I think to myself. I cannot imagine a robot trying to complete this process. In fact, it is quite laughable. This is only one case. I could go on describing many more that I have seen in my short time volunteering at this hospital. When we attempt to replace the personalized human care with the sterile efficiency of a robot, I wonder what will happen to the quality of care at hospitals. So I remind my engineer self, "Don't fix what ain't broke" and return instead to "fixing" surgical tools.

*Names have been modified for privacy reasons.