In the country of Bedenia, officials have recently

In the country of Bedenia, officials have recently implemented a new healthcare initiative to reduce dangerous wait times at emergency rooms in the country’s hospitals. This initiative increases the number of available emergency nurses and doctors in urban settings: scholarships and no-interest loans are being offered to prospective students in these fields if they work in major city hospitals, relocation packages to urban centers are being offered for current emergency practitioners, and immigration rules are being changed to enable foreign emergency doctors and nurses to more easily move to Bedenia’s major cities.

Which of the following would be most important to determine in assessing whether the initiative will be successful?

A) What percentage of current nurses and doctors work in emergency medicine

B) Which hospitals in Bedenia have dangerous wait times in their emergency rooms

C) Whether a career in emergency medicine pays substantially less than other types of medicine

D) Whether wait times could be reduced by means other than increasing the number of available nurses and doctors

E) Whether many foreign doctors and nurses are currently not allowed to enter Bedenia

OE:
This argument contains some clever wordplay that is easy to overlook. The goal of the initiative is to reduce dangerous wait times at emergency rooms in the country’s hospitals, but the initiative relates entirely to urban hospitals. What if almost all of the dangerous wait times occurred in rural or suburban hospitals? To determine whether this initiative will be successful, you need to know which hospitals have dangerous wait times (are they urban hospitals or not), so answer choice (B) is correct. The percentage of current nurses and doctors working in emergency medicine and pay rates for emergency medicine are not relevant to the success of this initiative so (A) and (C) are wrong. (D) is a trickier incorrect answer choice. This initiative as described is about getting more nurses and doctors available in emergency rooms. Whether or not there might be other ways to decrease wait times is not relevant to this initiative – you need information that helps assess whether this initiative will work, not whether other ones are possible. (E) also does not matter in assessing this initiative – while the goal is to encourage foreign doctors and nurses to come to urban hospitals, it is not important to know how many in general have been unable to enter the country. Answer is (B).

Hi Experts GMATNinjaTwo gmat1393 GMATNinja broall nightblade354

I chose "C"!

Why is C wrong!

In my reckoning, Choice "C" shows that despite the fact that a lot of efforts are put into luring people to work in emergency medical field what if the field pays substantially less than any other medical field?

Wont it make the affect the conclusion" to reduce dangerous wait times"?

I agree B is also a clever choice but whats wrong with "C"?

GMATNinja, GMATNinjaTwo, gmat1393, nightblade354

Why is option A wrong??

I think C could be a possible answer. The initiative is succeed or not also depends on if the concerned people are interested enough to relocate so or not...And if their salary is too low in the emergency medicine, they may be not interested in moving. From the argument, we can not say whether the benefit offered by the initiative can beat the salary or not.

I cannot understand why option A is wrong:

My understanding- Assumption is bringing more doctor and nurses would decrease the wait time.

Potential weaker - What if the number of nurses and doctor is not the cause of waiting? (i.e already high proportion of them are already working in emergency rooms)

Potential strengthener - low proportion of them are working => bringing more will help.

Let me try:

The main motive behind the initiative is to reduce dangerous wait times in hospitals across the country
There will few hospitals in the urban area and few in the villages.

Further the argument states that "This initiative increases the number of available emergency nurses and doctors in urban settings"

We can have a condition where there are very few hospitals in the urban area and lot more are concentrated in the villages.
Thus even if we implement a plan to increase the doctors, the increase may not affect the effectiveness in urban area where we do not know the existing situation of doctors.

In addition to that, the number of doctors and nurses in villages may remain the same or increase or decrease. We have absolutely no clue about it.
Hence, we have to make way too many assumptions to finally decide whether the situation in country will improve or not!

I have the same question in mind. Can someone answer pls?

I am still not convinced with the explanation provided for Option B.
The increase in the number of emergency doctors and nurses to any hospital would make initiative successful. But if there is any other means which is impacting the wait times then the initiate would fail.

Can you please advise how to approach such type of questions.

I have two doubt here
1)When already given in question that all the initiative are intended to increase doctor and nurses in urban setting then why we need to find out Which hospitals in Bedenia have dangerous wait times in their emergency rooms
2)What percentage of current nurses and doctors work in emergency medicine
If percentage of current nurses and doctors in emergency medicine are on high side then it might be possible that there are other ways to reduce waiting time and increasing nurses and doctor number will not be helpfull

Well I don't fully agree with OA also.

(A) For example-- What if the nurses and the doctors are already working at maximum capacity? say 100% ? . Will Increasing Number of docs or nurses be it RURAL or URBAN work? -- NO.

Say Now they are working at MIN capacity eg: 1%. -- Increasing then would work.

Aim: to reduce dangerous wait times at emergency rooms in the country’s hospitals.

Plan:
Increase the number of available emergency nurses and doctors in urban settings:
- scholarships and no-interest loans are being offered to work in major city hospitals,
- relocation packages to urban centers are being offered for current emergency practitioners, and
- immigration rules are being changed to enable foreign emergency doctors and nurses to more easily move to Bedenia’s major cities.

I see an immediate gap with the aim and the plan. The aim is to reduce dangerous wait times in country's hospitals. The plan is to increase doctors and nurses in major cities. It does not try to increase doctors and nurses everywhere in the country, only in major cities.

To evaluate whether the plan will work, I need to know whether the hospitals of major cities are the ones that have dangerous wait times. What if rural hospitals have few docs and nurses and hence dangerous wait times but the urban centres have enough docs and nurses already?

A. What percentage of current nurses and doctors work in emergency medicine

Doesn't matter. The plan is to increase whatever the current number is.

B. Which hospitals in Bedenia have dangerous wait times in their emergency rooms

Correct as we discussed above.

C. Whether a career in emergency medicine pays substantially less than other types of medicine

Irrelevant

D. Whether wait times could be reduced by means other than increasing the number of available nurses and doctors

Irrelevant. We need to find whether our plan will work or not. Whether there exists a better plan or an alternate plan is irrelevant.

E. Whether many foreign doctors and nurses are currently not allowed to enter Bedenia

Doesn't matter. We are trying to increase the number, whatever that number is right now.

Answer (B)

Hi,
For C, my thought process was that if emergency medicine already pays more substantially than other fields, then the packages will not be enough in luring the doctors on the other hand, if it is low, they will be lured by the packages and come to the hospitals. I get why B is the correct answer but I don't think that C is irrelevant. Please correct me.

Hello experts - DmitryFarber VeritasKarishma GMATNinja - I know for evaluate questions, there is normally a yes/no split when it comes to the answer choices.

One split in the correct answer choice will STRENGTHEN the argument whereas another split will WEAKEN the argument.

For option B, the split for "which hospitals......." seems to be
-- Urban hospitals
-- Rural hospitals

What is the split for Option A ?
Is it perhaps ?
-- High percentage
vs.
-- Low percentage

Thanks for the question and answer, but I think D should be the answer.
Let us begin with the question : Which of the following would be most important to determine in assessing whether the initiative will be successful?
So it's about ensuring the success of the initiative.
What is the purpose of initiative? From the first sentence, "a new healthcare initiative to reduce dangerous wait times at emergency rooms in the country’s hospitals"
The initiative will be successful if it can decrease wait times.
Now, the following sentence states the plan to increase doctors and nurses in emergency nurses.
This is when we need to ask questions. Why increasing doctors and nurses? What if the number of doctors and nurses is already enough but the waiting time is caused by another thing, such as administrative issues?
So then we need to really find out the root cause if we want to solve this waiting time issue which is on option D.

Good question that reinforces the idea to carefully read the argument and extract important details.

The entire plan is focused on “urban settings”. The 4 parts of the plan keep discussing urban settings. What if the wait times are fine in just the urban settings? Would this plan then get us to the goal of reducing the overall wait times?

Maybe not, if all the wait times are in rural areas

Similar in a far fetched way to the arguments that make generalizations based on a small sub group of the whole. The goal is focused on the whole country. However, the plan expected to reach that goal focuses on one subset of the country: urban areas.

The Goal they are seeking to address is to reduce the dangerous wait times in hospitals. However we do not know anything about the problems on a geographic basis: urban areas vs NON urban areas.

If the plan is solely focused on urban areas, then how can it reduce the dangerous wait times if they all occur in non urban area hospitals?

B - need to know the geographic breakdown of where these wait times are happening in order to evaluate whether the plan is likely or not likely to reach the goal.

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Since (A) asks for the percentage of doctors that are emergency doctors, the answer could be a high percentage or a low percentage. In either case, it is irrelevant to our argument.
Out of 100 total doctors, whether 10 work in emergency, or 60 work in emergency doesn't matter. Whatever the number is, it is falling short. The plan does not include training regular doctors to become emergency doctors so whatever the number, it won't help us figure whether our plan will achieve its aim or not. What else can achieve our aim is irrelevant.