Hospital administration

Oh dear. I realise that nobody wants to read this, but i just need to write it down. If not, hatred will consume me from the inside out. A void will start to appear in me, where I now keep my other emotions and slowly and slowly there will be nothing else but a thorough feeling of pain, misery and sorrow. Hospital administration is the root of all fear, it centres deeply felt distress and most importantly, administrators are plain silly. Allow me to elaborate.

For all this time that I have been roaming the hospital floor and about 90% of that time was spent fortunately in the ED, I have seen how health care works. It is nice nurses that hold your hand while you vomit and it is doctors that prescribe antibiotics knowing perfectly well that time will heal, or it may not. It is simply not ours to control. We guide, we try… we help and we soothe. Medicine cannot be controlled. Not only do therapies not always work, patients don’t seem particularly keen on following instructions. Other stuff turns out to be more important (who will feed my dog when I am in) and clinical care is not much better then your mother-in-law walking in on you every once in a while when you don’t want her there.

Yet administrators tend to think that care can be directed to an extend that actual numbers make a difference. A directive should not only be followed but should be measured and then, when the numbers don’t add up, more  measuring of the data needs to be done. Where medicine can only be measured at the end (the patient survived, or more likely – had a pretty good feeling about their stay), we try to calculate in between scores.

And, the obvious answer to all of this, empowering nurses, empowering doctors, empowering patients to say what they need, what they want. To make them feel in control and more important in charge seems to be at the bottom of the list of administration priorities. Why is that? Why does administration ask doctors if they met their targets in stead of asking them what they need to deliver better care.

I ask them, I beg them to give them what I need. In no particular order: Decent medium care facilities in all hospitals. Social workers that have full responsibility, sexy nurses and patient empowerment programs.

if only one can be achieved then for gods sake hire the sexy nurses. That usually makes social workers more likely to roam the ward and will somehow empower patients anyway.