Dear industrial engineer consultants who advice in healthcare
please stop doing these three things.
I definitely love engineering thinking and sympathize with it 99.9% of the time… The other 0.1% is what brought us here…
As a person with a B.Sc. in healthcare and a M.Sc. in industrial engineering that currently works in hospital process improvement, I frequently see the terrible combination engineers and healthcare professionals can be.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not all chaos and destruction. Fortunately for our patients and their families, healthcare and engineering have been falling in love in the past decades. A lot of quality and safety practices have been imported into healthcare that saved the lives of millions. But as any relationship, it needs a lot of TLC or it can easily follow as a disrupted rather than a mutual acceptance one; making it even harder to adopt good engineering practices.
What angers me the most, is that negative encounters could be easily avoided.
In a way, engineers and healthcare professionals can be like the unstoppable force and the immovable object in the spear and shield paradox.
Philosophical metaphor parenthesis…
It refers to self-contradictory circumstances. It’s based on a 300 BC story about a Chinese merchant selling a spear that could pierce any shield and a shield that could defend from all spears. When asked what would happen when hitting his shield with his spear, the man couldn’t answer…
Physicians and nurses are generally the immovable objects in healthcare systems, there is a good reason though: we cannot accept changes easily, we need extensive proof of quality or safety improvement before adding it to our practice. Mainly because the opposite situation could result in a lot of endangering clinical situations. So, if engineers come telling us they have the answer to our prayers, for the sake of our patients, WE WILL ALWAYS DOUBT IT. (be terrified if we don’t…)
Engineers, when participating as consultants in healthcare, act usually as the unstoppable force. They come with all their experience, generally from other industries, to shoot everything they’ve got at us. That itself is wonderful, the thing is, without caring about a few things… we won’t hear or apply a thing.
So… Industrial Engineer, if you advice in any kind of healthcare setting… PLEASE avoid doing these three things if you want the immovable object to move:
1. Don’t give any kind of advice before knowing the whole present situation
It’s a horrible initial approach.
It’s likely that from there on we’ll feel your solution is invalid because you don’t know us and we won’t take you seriously. Also, if for any reason your advice is about something we’ve already tried and didn’t work, we will automatically kick you out.
On the other hand, if you manage to show us deep knowledge of our processes and how your proposal will help us taking better care of our patients (and it isn’t something we have tried before), we’ll fall platonically in love with you.
2. Don’t underestimate our efforts or assume we haven’t tried that
Stop taking for granted that you’ll have better solutions to our problems.
You need to know we are usually eager to improve and it’s mostly certain we have tried a lot to be better. We take care of human lives and that drives our personalities to pursue perfection. If you make us feel we haven’t done enough, we will automatically kick you out and hate you.
On the other hand, if you take the time to hear what we have tried and why we think it didn’t work. We’ll feel heard and understood and we will think on having a serious loving relationship with you.
3. NEVER say a healthcare problem can be easily fixed
We WILL be instantly offended.
Understand that healthcare problems and risks aren’t just multifactorial, but also highly complex and prone to change.
It cannot be easily compared to a production line, a warehouse inventory, nor a just-in-time system. If for some reason you dare suggest your solution “easily” fixes anything: we’ll kick you out, hate you and make it impossible for you to return.
On the other hand, if we notice you’re making real efforts to understand our complex clinical processes. We’ll try our best to make you an expert, and collaboration will be born in a beautiful way from our mutual acceptance relationship (we could even think of marrying you).
Seriously, it’s not that hard. We can be stubborn but also really cool people. Ask us, hear us, empathize with us and our patients and we will have a long-lasting relationship.
Ros, out.
