The gown card reads “addressing the wrong problems.”
This is actually a, well problem in healthcare.
There is something wrong. For example, there are red scrubs when there should only be blue scrubs.
Instead of thinking about where the red scrubs came from, addressing the wrong problem would be changing all the scrubs worn by staff to the red scrubs. Regardless of where they came from, who is washing them, and how do we get them back. And, most importantly, how much do they cost.
A lot of healthcare decisions seem to be made on the fly, to address the problem right in front of leadership.
Little thought is given to how this may impact the worker in a month’s time.
The problem is the red scrubs that are somehow in place of the normal blue scrubs.
The answer is not change to the red scrubs! The proper solution requires some investigation.
Instead of a blanket, knee-jerk reaction, it is better to be calm and thoughtful about making changes that will impact the entire organization.
If you are continually putting out fires, you never investigate where they come from or why they start.
And you never realize there is a dragon with a cold at the top of the hospital.
This is what I mean by investigating the source, and not just treating the problem right in front of you.
You see this in internal medicine as well.
There is a famous joke that starts, “Doc, doc, it hurts when I do this.”
The this might be any number of things.
Instead of investigating, the doctor says, “Well, don’t do that!”
If the doctor had just looked at the problem, they would realize that there is a bigger problem underneath the little problem. Such as the broken finger that hurts in a 21-year-old with no mechanism of injury.
In healthcare, we call that masking.
The little problem, which is the complaint, is hiding the bigger problem, which is the bone disease that led to the broken finger.
But guess which one gets addressed?
Dispatches from the Evening Shift 