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Wesley Hoyle's avatar

There is also the issue of the patients' responses to all this. I have deferred appointments due to persistent masking requirements.

If a healthcare provider thinks that masking makes good logical sense, how am I supposed to trust that any of the other medical advice I get from them is well-founded?

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Ari Reddy's avatar

I’ve been fighting this in our institution, but until the CDC rescinds the nonsense recommendation to keep masking everything in the hospital I doubt the admin types will give it up.

Firstly infection control is loathe to give up any inconvenience in American hospitals, hell I remember in residency we did a unit randomized trial at washU that demonstrated no effect from MRSA isolation and we are still doing that nonsense almost a decade on. Secondly admin types are risk averse in terms of regulation, they aren’t that inconvenienced by this and they aren’t personally effected by the discomfort or worsened communication, not to mention they’ve never met a stupid rule created by JCAHO and government types they didn’t like to enforce as a demonstration of their commitment to “quality.”

Obviously anyone who has seen a patient in the last two decades knows that “quality” is not the same as actual quality. Hell, the rest of the world including the UK NHS dropped the hospital masking about 6 months ago. As a bonus the CDC is still loathe to drop the stupid masking advice across the board. I know they can read so I assume this is because they are offending members of the safetyists mostly on the far left wing who are actually under the impression that a life without risk is possible and worth living, neither of which are true.

Basically the ongoing mandatory masking in hospitals is a manifestation of the core disease of healthcare in our country, which is the cancerous and rapid growth of administrative types who mostly serve to grow the administrative side of healthcare further and further.

In short, ugh!

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