While COVID-19 spreads among and almost in every country affecting thousands globally, selected hospitals, public health experts, and also intensive care units in hospitals are currently facing a huge challenge of catering patients with required medical equipment especially on deciding who requires ventilators. Countries like China, The United States of America, Italy, Spain are currently at the top of the list of patients infected and deaths since the spread of the coronavirus since last December.
Hospitals are everywhere scrambling to secure more ventilators, while doctors everywhere are getting creative on developing machines and creating new ones in order to prepare for an emergency situation if one is to occur in the near future. This clearly shows how doctors and nurses go to the ends of the world in order to help their patients fight the virus.
Canadian doctor Dr. Alain Gauthier is an anesthetist at the Perth and Smith Falls District Hospital in Ontario the capital city of Canada has turned one hospital ventilator into a machine that can serve nine patients at once at its normal power. Dr. Gauthier has a Ph.D. in respiratory mechanics which he took to an advantage of the knowledge to build the nine patient serving ventilator machine using do-it-yourself mechanics.
It has been reported to CBC News, that the physician was inspired by a video created back in 2006 by two Detriot doctors. The rig involves running two hoses from one ventilator which doubles the power. But everything comes a catch, which means in order to perform this task, the patients have to be paired who have similar lung size and capacity and if in case a patient declines the process, things will have to be arranged, says Dr. Gauthier.
According to the Canadian Press, Dr. Gauthier said he worries that his hospital won’t have the required amount of ventilators to the high-risk population’s need in case of a plight. As reported from the Canadian Press, Dr. Gauthier says the idea has been tried once, back when the mass shooting took place in Las Vegas for its victims in 2017.
As soon as the model was developed by Dr. Gauthier, his fellow colleague who is a Twitter user and rural physician named Dr. Alan Drummond shared a post about the inspired creation with do-it-yourself mechanics that treats nine patients at once instead of one. This post also resulted in gaining many likes and shares and also Dr. Gauthier was named as an ‘evil genius’ for his discovery.
So in ten minutes the evil genius who is one of our GP anaesthetists (with a PhD in diaphragmatic mechanics) increased our rural hospitals ventilator capacity from one to nine!!! pic.twitter.com/yNmuCCDbWd
— alan drummond (@alandrummond2) March 17, 2020
