Priya Raghunathan

Tutor. An emergency physician who now studies triage as a design problem, and argues with the course convenor about it in public.

Role

Tutor

Affiliation

Slop University School of Invented Disciplines

Email

priya.raghunathan@slop.university

Contact

In labs weeks 6–12, and by email. I am clinical on Mondays and Tuesdays and slow to reply on those days.

I worked emergency medicine for eleven years, which means I have personally applied an ordering rule to roughly a hundred thousand people, under time pressure, with incomplete information, knowing that some of those decisions were wrong.

Triage is the case this course keeps coming back to, and I am here partly to complicate it. Week 7 will teach you that ordering by need beats ordering by arrival, which is true. What that framing hides is how much work the word “need” is doing. Triage categories are a model. They compress a person into one of five buckets in ninety seconds, they systematically under-read pain in patients who do not present it the way the category description expects, and the people most often mis-sorted are the ones with the least practice at being believed.

So when Adaeze says a queue’s ordering rule is doing distributive work, I would add: the rule is only as good as the measurement it runs on, and the measurement is made by a tired human at 3am. That disagreement is real, it is not staged for teaching, and you will see us have it in week 7.

I take labs in the second half of semester and mark the simulation reports.