‘Happy New Year!’
‘Happy New Year to you too’
It’s early in the morning, on one of those quiet days in the first week of January.
I’m sat in one of many waiting areas for the eye-casualty unit, waiting to be triaged.
While I wait, I watch and listen to what goes on at the reception desk.
There are 3 people there. One is obviously new, and has been given a bunch of paper referrals to type into the system. But they don’t know how the system works, so constantly interrupt the other two to ask how to do something.
The other two, one a consultant by the look of them and the other the person who normally works at the desk are going through a set of paper referrals that are problematic. Not medically problematic, just directed to the wrong place, or filled in incorrectly. As a result they don’t fit into the system, and have to be adjusted or reallocated. Which takes a consultant’s knowledge.
Meanwhile, from the triage area, I can hear a back and forth going on: ‘Where are the keys?’, ‘Whose got the keys?’ ‘X had them last’, ‘I don’t have them now, I gave them to Y’, ‘Where’s Y?’.
It’s not as if people haven’t tried to introduce systems. Each of the many waiting areas has a big screen on the wall. It shows 2 columns headings: ‘Patient name’ and ‘Go to’. But the screens never change.
When the triage nurse is ready to see me, they come out of their cubbyhole and call my name. Ditto from the next waiting area when the doctor wants to see me. Clearly, calling is quicker than working out which of the waiting rooms the patient is in and typing in their name and their next destination. Maybe that’s something the desk people are meant to do. But of course they’re too busy wrestling with the referral/appointments system.
That’s just one hour of one part of a big and busy hospital. How much more non-work is going on there?
How much non-work goes on inside any large organisation? From my memory at least, quite as much as this.
Why does it happen?
Because the people in charge have forgotten what their organisation really is – a system for enabling human beings to make and keep promises to other human beings. So they’ve failed to design it to do that. Instead they design or worse, adopt off the shelf, systems that create non-work – drudgery – instead of automating it.
No wonder we have a productivity problem. And an employee engagement problem.
