If there is one thing the media will not stop printing, it's stories about how hospitals need more money. Budgets are stretched to breaking point. Patients are left stuck on trolleys in corridors because of a lack of beds. Blah blah blah.
Bollocks to the lot of them.
The strongest impression I got this week from RPA is that the staff spend all day doing nothing but paperwork. I walked into a ward of 30 beds, of which maybe 24 were occupied, and at the nursing station there were six nurses filling in paperwork. That spared maybe one or two to actually walk around the ward and do things like feed, change, clean and generally help out the patients. It was the same story every time I went past. On one visit, I spotted 10 nurses and doctors doing their paperwork. They were quite dilligent about it, and seemed to be doing it as quickly as possible, but they were dealing with mountains of it, and there aren't enough hours in the day (or a shift) to get it all done and deal with the patients that are bleeding to death in bed 9.
I guess litigation has brought us to this sorry state of affairs, plus the fact that stupid medical dramas teach people that doctors can save everybody, even those suffering from hideous injuries or wierd diseases. No, that's bollocks - that's just TV. TV stations also broadcast shows about aliens, Atlantis and movies about a kid with spider powers.
It makes you wonder whether they'd be better of deciding to just pay all the litigation rather than fighting it, and abolishing all the paperwork. Everyone wants to save money by not paying for litigation, but no one counts the cost of doing all the form filling that might mitigate some, but not all of the costs of a lawsuit. If they have to employ 10 nurses per shift rather than 3 because of all the paperwork, what is that costing per year? Especially when that floor had 4 wards like that one, and I think there are wards on 3 or 4 floors.
The best thing the Greenies could do for the health system would be to strictly ration the amount of paper that a hospital can have each year. Give RPA say a million sheets of A4. When it runs out, tough - no more forms to fill in. If they run out of A4 in May, I guess they can spend the next 7 months being productive until the semi-trailers arrive with the 2008 shipment of red tape. If you limit how much paper everyone gets, people might start to prioritise and only fill out the stuff that absolutely needs to be filled out, then binning all the not so important stuff.
Why am I not a CEO?
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