Post-it 11/21/21- married to the idea (thumbs down)

The post-it reads ‘don’t be married to their plans’.

As discussed previous, Murphy lives in the OR.

And lives to fuck plans up.

This is meant to be a post-it to management.

Too often they are married to their horrible ideas.

By that I mean that they will see their plans through without acknowledging new information that comes in and points out how bad the plans are.

A few years ago, AORN came out and said that OR personnel should only wear disposable hats.

I have twenty+ cloth hats.

There are reasons for wearing a cloth hat.

It weighs down my very fine hair so I don’t get flyaways.

The cloth hat controls the edges of the my hair so that I don’t like a dandelion while in a sterile environment with all the hairs escaping.

The cloth hat allows me to show a little personality.

The thing is they have to be washed, properly in hot water, after every use.

And no one wants to keep track of that.

Therefore an honor system was set up.

Washing was still not being done.

AORN threw their hands up and declared cloth hats were forbidden, because no one could be counted on to wash theirs.

And my OR banned cloth hats.

Yeah.

So many, many problems with paper hats.

Some people who have short spiky hair, the hair was protruding through the paper.

Some people, such as myself, have very fine hair and the paper hats could never hope to control that.

I would put up my mask and the hat would be near the back of my head, exposing the front half of my head.

And no one would tell me.

The hats were meant to be discarded after every shift.

You can bet that wasn’t happening.

Ew.

I set up a research project involving paper hats and hair spillage.

I took pictures every day of my coworkers.

At the beginning of the shift, when their hair was somewhat neatly contained.

And at the end of the shift, with hair half escaped the paper hats.

There were listening tours by management and they had to listen to us complain about the paper hats.

I talked about my research project before the research symposium.

There was an uptick in surgical infections.

A root cause analysis pointed at the paper hats.

AORN quietly put into place that cloth hats were okay, as long as they were washed regularly, and covered with a PAPER hat.

The hospital followed suit.

Same rules as before.

The point is don’t be married to terrible ideas.

You never know when new information will come out to disprove or disrupt the plan.

Or infections may go up through unintended consequences.

When many people tell management their idea is terrible, too often they double down.

And make the idea more terrible.