July 2010
9 posts
"Letting Go"
Atul Gawande at The New Yorker:
People have concerns besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys of patients with terminal illness find that their top priorities include, in addition to avoiding suffering, being with family, having the touch of others, being mentally aware, and not becoming a burden to others. Our system of technological medical care has utterly failed to meet these needs,...
Speak Human
Dan Pink:
So try an experiment. For the next seven days, go monolingual and speak only human at work. Don’t say anything to your boss, your staff, your teammate, your supplier or your customer that you wouldn’t say to your spouse or your friend.
Trying things
I think we should all just go ahead and acknowledge that no matter how the macro-economic healthcare resources are distributed or the system through which they are delivered will ever reach an ideal state.
Okay?
That said, we shouldn’t ever stop trying to reach it—even with different definitions of what exactly that ideal state may be. The flux of it all is the engine of its...
Fake bus stop prevents patients from leaving
The Telegraph:
The bus stop, in front of the Benrath Senior Centre in the western city of Düsseldorf, is an exact replica of a standard stop, with one small difference: buses never stop there.
The idea emerged after the centre was forced to rely on police to retrieve patients who wanted to return to their homes and families but had forgotten that in many cases neither existed any longer.
...
Does Your Job Title Get the Job Done? →
Have you ever wondered why that healthcare exec has seventeen different titles? Evidently there’s a motive.
Creativity matters.
An article by Po Bronson and Ashley Merrymen at Newsweek about creativity has been making the internet rounds.
All around us are matters of national and international importance that are crying out for creative solutions, from saving the Gulf of Mexico to bringing peace to Afghanistan to delivering health care. Such solutions emerge from a healthy marketplace of ideas, sustained by a populace...
When Nurses Go on Strike - Freakonomics Blog →
Unions.
I was ready to comment on this article about the potential nurse strike in Minnesota. I’ve been following the labor dispute loosely; what has surprised me is the predominantly anti-union sentiment taken by newspaper article commenters (Minnesota tends to the liberal side of the spectrum).
This afternoon hospitals and the union agreed to a to-be-voted-upon proposal. Good news for patients....