Because most hospitals suffer a chronic undersupply of physicians, pat

Question

Because most hospitals suffer a chronic undersupply of physicians, patients must sometimes wait hours in the emergency room to see a doctor. Nurses should therefore perform initial examinations in hospital emergency rooms to determine which patients merit immediate treatment and which can wait until the emergency physicians have more time to see them.

Which of the following is an assumption on which the argument above is based?

A. Hospitals should expand their medical staffs.

B. Physicians cannot be trained to perform initial examinations themselves.

C. Emergency rooms will run more smoothly if initial examinations are performed.

D. Hospitals are always fully staffed with nurses.

E. Nurses are competent to judge the severity of patients' conditions.

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narangvaibhav · Accepted Answer

right ans clearly boils down to D or E

By negating option D=> Hospitals are not always fully staffed with nurses.
This means that in a given series of discrete days there is a possibility that in one, or more, or all days the nurses are not fully staffed, but it does not necessarily mean that they are always understaffed. It sure does affect the argument to a certain extent, but lesser than the impact caused by negating E.

By negating E=> The nurses are not competant to judge the severity of the patient's condition.
This totally nullifies the conclusion, suggesting the possibility that there will be instances where low priority patients are attended to prior to critical cases.

Now weigh the impacts of negating D & E and you will see negating E does more damage to the conclusion

Bunuel · Answer

OFFICIAL EXPLANATION

The conclusion is that nurses should examine patients to determine which deserve to be seen first by the doctors. The basis for this claim is that hospitals lack adequate numbers of physicians.

(A) The idea of having nurses make the initial examination does not depend on increasing the medical staff.

(B) The main premise for the conclusion was that patients ended up waiting due to an undersupply of doctors. There weren't enough doctors to perform the initial examination. If the doctors perform the initial examinations there will be no time saved.

(C) The conclusions rests on whether or not the nurses would be able to perform the examinations, not on what the result of them doing the examinations would 
be.

(D) The hospitals don't need to be fully staffed with nurses for the nurses to perform the initial examination.

(E) CORRECT.  This argument is valid only if we assume that nurses are competent to determine which patients merit immediate treatment.

metallicafan · Answer

+1 E

My explanations are in red and blue:

adamtooch · Answer

Need a hand with this one. I know arguing about questions is futile but this is not an OG question.

Since the argument is about reducing the wait times in ERs, why does the competency of nurses have a greater impact on the argument than the number of available nurses? With the opposite of option D: "The hospitals are never fully staffed with nurses," the hospital would have the same problem with nurses as they do with physicians, thus having no impact on wait times.

I agree that the incompetent nurses would cause the wrong patients to be triaged but they would still reduce wait times. If the argument were about the treatment of the patients, this would certainly be more critical

anairamitch1804 · Answer

Conclusion :- Nurses should perform initial examinations on patients to identify which one needs immediate attention and which don't.

Negating answer choice E :-
Nurses are not competent to judge the severity of patients’ conditions.{As nurses are not competent then they should not perform initial examinations on
patients breaking the conclusion of the argument} Hence E is the correct assumption here.

VerbalBot · Answer

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Because most hospitals suffer a chronic undersupply of physicians, pat

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