I think you will find the following a bit shocking.
Several years ago, I think it was 2002 or so, I attended a quarterly meeting of an IT subcommittee at the PCT. During the coffee break, one of the managers asked me if I was doing any sessions in the local A+E department the following week. They were recruiting local GPs to do sessions for that week, because there was an audit, a national audit, on waiting times in A+E. I said, no, I was too busy. And thought nothing more of it until a few years later.
Perhaps in 2006 or so I was feeling particularly overloaded with demands being made on us and I found myself reflecting on how mad some of the planning was. I thought back to the A+E audit. An audit is an exercise to find out how something is working. You gather data to see how you are doing. The results then help you plan some changes in order improve things so that you can improve whatever it is you are investigating; then you repeat the audit and see if things have improved.
Now the strange thing about this A+E audit was that it wasn’t going to tell the planners how things were. It was going to tell them how things would be if you hired extra doctors to do the job. Now I am assuming that this audit was meant to answer the question, ‘How are we doing?’ and not ‘How would we do if we hired extra doctors and pulled out all the stops?’
So an audit was performed; extra money was spent; the results purported to show you how the ‘normal’ service performed, but in reality told you how things would work if you hired extra doctors and did the best you could for a week. The shocking thing is this: you think you are checking on how things are, you are given results. You presumably use these results to plan things. So the results are in reality misleading: they make you think you a doing better than you are, and you have spent extra money to get this wrong data.
This is pretty shocking. But what is also shocking is that at the time I thought little of it. I did not say, ‘This is mad.’ I didn’t even think it. Nor did my colleagues, whom I viewed as thoughtul people.
And I have observed further anomalies over the years which have been a bit mad, and otherwise sensible, thoughtful people not challenging it but just getting their heads down, and getting on with it.
And so I posited an explanation for this: infection with LCFV (Loss of Critical Faculties Virus). What this infection does is dulls your critical faculties so you become slow-witted, accepting of whatever you are presented with, and you just get on with it.
Once you become aware of this terrible virus, things begin to make sense.
This entry was posted on Saturday, January 29th, 2011 at 16:07 and is filed under General Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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One GP's Protest
On the loss of critical faculties
I think you will find the following a bit shocking.
Several years ago, I think it was 2002 or so, I attended a quarterly meeting of an IT subcommittee at the PCT. During the coffee break, one of the managers asked me if I was doing any sessions in the local A+E department the following week. They were recruiting local GPs to do sessions for that week, because there was an audit, a national audit, on waiting times in A+E. I said, no, I was too busy. And thought nothing more of it until a few years later.
Perhaps in 2006 or so I was feeling particularly overloaded with demands being made on us and I found myself reflecting on how mad some of the planning was. I thought back to the A+E audit. An audit is an exercise to find out how something is working. You gather data to see how you are doing. The results then help you plan some changes in order improve things so that you can improve whatever it is you are investigating; then you repeat the audit and see if things have improved.
Now the strange thing about this A+E audit was that it wasn’t going to tell the planners how things were. It was going to tell them how things would be if you hired extra doctors to do the job. Now I am assuming that this audit was meant to answer the question, ‘How are we doing?’ and not ‘How would we do if we hired extra doctors and pulled out all the stops?’
So an audit was performed; extra money was spent; the results purported to show you how the ‘normal’ service performed, but in reality told you how things would work if you hired extra doctors and did the best you could for a week. The shocking thing is this: you think you are checking on how things are, you are given results. You presumably use these results to plan things. So the results are in reality misleading: they make you think you a doing better than you are, and you have spent extra money to get this wrong data.
This is pretty shocking. But what is also shocking is that at the time I thought little of it. I did not say, ‘This is mad.’ I didn’t even think it. Nor did my colleagues, whom I viewed as thoughtul people.
And I have observed further anomalies over the years which have been a bit mad, and otherwise sensible, thoughtful people not challenging it but just getting their heads down, and getting on with it.
And so I posited an explanation for this: infection with LCFV (Loss of Critical Faculties Virus). What this infection does is dulls your critical faculties so you become slow-witted, accepting of whatever you are presented with, and you just get on with it.
Once you become aware of this terrible virus, things begin to make sense.
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This entry was posted on Saturday, January 29th, 2011 at 16:07 and is filed under General Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.