Healthcare doesn’t have a monopoly on administrative stupidity
We spend most of this blog griping about the constraints doctors and nurses face as we simply try to do our jobs. Healthcare is king of the world for money wasting stupidity and unnecessary blockades. We’re tops at burning out doctors and nurses! No one can beat us!
Public Schools: “Hold my beer and watch this!”Teachers are completely obliterated by impossible lists of tasks they must perform in addition to simply teaching the necessary coursework. Ask any teacher and they will rattle off a long list of things they must do which prevent them from doing the basic work we want them to do, such as teaching Algebra. Their jobs have become impossible.
Then, you add in amazingly dysfunctional County School Boards and Supervisors and you have a catastrophe which humbles the mischief any hospital administrator could accomplish.
In my local area of Central and Northern Virginia, the antics are nothing short of amazing. Everyone is insane. Just Google:
Spotsylvania County School Board Insane
Loudoun County School Board Insane
…And watch the fun and games. Nothing useful is getting accomplished. All sorts of videos pop up. Lots of yelling and screaming. People getting arrested. Wouldn’t it be fun if hospital meetings went this way?
Meanwhile, in another local county, Stafford County, they apparently got jealous of the national attention expended on its neighbors and felt they needed to do some insane stuff of their own. So, they gathered all the teachers and staff of the entire county school system during a horrible Virginia heatwave and made them sit in the horrible sun and humidity, without shade, in our city’s minor league baseball stadium to hear long winded speeches by School Administrators. It was mandatory.
Hmmm…. How could that possibly go bad?https://fredericksburg.com/news/local/8-hospitalized-over-100-treated-for-heat-related-illness-at-stafford-educators-event/article_0693e5df-b114-50c4-8c0d-bd30307afe59.htmlEight school staffers landed in the hospital and another 120 were treated for heat disorders.
The folks who planned this event defended their efforts to make sure everyone had water (which they did not). By the way, why do so many otherwise educated people think it is okay to exercise, stand or sit in the hot overhead sun with temps in the 90s and high humidity…. Just so long as we give you some water?
What is not mentioned in the article was the need to evacuate the thousands of participants on buses, blocking city traffic for hours. Emergency services over a wide region were activated. It was a ridiculous mass casualty exercise.
These are educated people who are supposed to be educating our kids and it all leaves me speechless.
Pause, now. Reflect….See what I did here?
I just made you think Healthcare is relatively organized and well run.
Now, don’t you feel better about your job?
You’re welcome!
“An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia mundus regatur?”
Axel Oxenstiema in 1648.
Axel Oxenstiema was a Swede, a stateman of great fame in Swedish history. As I understand the back story: His son, also a diplomat, serving on behalf of Sweden, was engaged in negotiations with representatives of a foreign power. The son wrote to his father, confessing fear he was not up to the task. Father wrote back,.
“An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia mundus regatur?”
“Do you not understand, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?”
I think father was trying to reassure his son. I am not reassured, because unfortunately, he was right in 1648 and he is right today.
I came across this phrase in reading about Sweden’s response to the COVID pandemic. Johan Giesece had been Sweden’s state epidemiologist between 1995 and 2005. He was writing Anders Tegnell, the current state epidemiologist during the COVID pandemic. Well, you really have to read the story for yourself.
https://unherd.com/2022/06/sweden-saved-children-from-lockdown/
or here
https://www.city-journal.org/the-who-does-not-deserve-the-nobel-peace-prize
Obviously need more resiliency training.
You hit the key point – “the MAIN issue is lack of respect.” Everywhere in American business, there seems to be an institutional contempt for those who actually do the work for which the organization stands. Police, medicine and teaching are prime examples. How did we get the attitude that the agents who DO things are to be treated as factory-floor wage-slaves? Why does the administration turn out and condemn individuals every time things go wrong, more often than not a SYSTEM error? Why do inhuman systems hate their human members?
The common factor is that at the federal level, this moron nation decided that education and healthcare are “rights” both requiring centralized oversight and planning, requiring hundreds of billions, and requiring self-perpetuating, ever-enlarging mountains of bullshit. Little wonder that both industries have worsened in quality, become ridiculously more expensive with no end in sight, and despite our chest puffing, both are thoroughly dishonest.
At least with teachers and nurses, everybody thinks the big fix is to increase pay/benefits. (How many people say doctors should get paid more?) I do not believe that will work since the MAIN issue is lack of respect. Sound familiar? I just found an email in my inbox from Instamed- a healthcare payment intermediary who is obviously out for themselves (why do they even exist?) stating that I need to attend an on demand webinar that is all about how patients are ready to leave their present physicians (providers?) in order to find those that accept the simpler electronic payments-like Bitcoin??? No, this is a company who faxes me payments and then simultaneously tells me I could save the hassle of paper payment by enrolling in their EFT program for $2.99/ transaction. Is this not stupid….charging me so they have less work/expenses and can become more profitable.