On Sunday I was discharged from hospital after a week’s stay. I was there because of a mistake. The previous Sunday night I went to A&E feeling rotten and with a bad stomach ache. The A&E was in a real emergency state trying to prioritise super urgent cases against relatively urgent. So it took them all night to find time to see me and assess me properly. By 5.30 in the morning I was finally diagnosed and asked to report for theatre admissions the same morning at 0730. I needed a laparoscopy on my appendix – a simple and relatively short keyhole surgical procedure where they send you home the same day. Cheap. Fast. Quick recovery time. Minimum burden on the patient and on the hospital.
At 7.30am I announced myself at the theatre admissions reception. (Later on they said they hadn’t been told I was there.) I was in considerable pain but I had to wait in the reception area for 4 hours, all the time, my appendix getting worse. Finally I was put on a gurney, given paracetamol and parked in a bay. The pain increased but I kept being told that someone else had been prioritised over me but that I was next. Only at 4.00 pm – after my insistence they start an official complaint process – did the doctor come. I was prepped for my “simple procedure” and wheeled into the theatre. They said that was the first available slot I could have had. Then they put the anaesthetic in my skin rather than my vein because the cannula had been put in incorrectly. It was agony. They had to start again. When they opened me up things got worse. The appendix had ruptured and spread gangrene everywhere. It was now a major 4 hour operation.
Delay after delay and mistake after mistake. Endless delay had caused my appendix to rupture. Big scare, two drains in the abdomen, full on wash out to try and eliminate secondary infection, days of recovery in hospital. Lots of manpower sucked into a completely avoidable situation, the use of a much needed hospital bed and goodness knows how much expense. All because of the poor management of a system that just does not work.
We all know of the enormous pressures on the NHS these times. It cannot cope. It is stuck in a vicious circle of decision making where everything has to get to a critical emergency point before any action is taken. Things are left to the point where all resources have to be thrown at a problem because it has become so urgent it can no longer be ignored without imminent threat to life. It changes the focus from protecting and improving people’s health to saving their lives. It makes the crisis continuous, unending and habitual. In my case, a simple procedure would have saved tens of thousands of pounds, hundreds of man hours and also let me go home and get on with my own job with minimum interruption. The knock on effects of having prevaricated until my health was critical have put more delays into the system, soaked up valuable resources and accelerated the vicious circle of inefficiency that is breaking the NHS.
In hospital, they have a notice board above your bed with your name on it. They couldn’t even spell my name correctly, even though, every time they give you medicines, they require you to confirm your name and date of birth to match it against what they have written on their paperwork. Why does it matter that they spell your name correctly? Because it sends a signal. A signal that I matter. And if they cannot even spell my own name correctly, what other details are they getting wrong? Details such as putting my cannula in correctly so the anaesthetic doesn’t cause my arm to swell up and add even more pain to an already painful process. QED.
This is what happens when an organisation or an individual operates in crisis mode and gets its priorities muddled. It ends up being its own worst enemy. It ends up being dis-functional. And you end up being the Chief Emergency Officer.
Using the parallel of my recent experience with how most companies treat new business and how, let’s face it, most of us carry on day to day with our own personal and business prioritisation, is a sobering exercise. For example:
- Those who rush from pitch to pitch with ever diminishing returns and flail around in their own new business A&E Hell, chasing everything which moves and losing over and over again, never learning from their mistakes.
- The companies which know that their communication is really poor (riddled with jargon, confusing, badly phrased, not properly proofread) and yet relegate it to something to be sorted out at some vague time in the future are just storing up potential disaster. One misplaced letter in a name will sabotage months of new business prospecting. One thoughtless management summary undoes months of pitch progress.
- We have been running events we call Walks of wisdom, which are an opportunity for those people whose next move might be beyond life at the top of corporations to step back and think, and talk with other people who have already made that move. The amount of people who sign up and say “ooh, I’d love to come on one of those, it is perfect timing” but then never commit to a date, is legion.
How often do we know that our business needs a change, an improvement, a solution, but we find ourselves performing triage and prioritising other projects not because they are more important but because they are more urgent? Especially now, when “unprecedented circumstances” always provide a ready made excuse for working in the A&E mode for months and months and months.
We are all guilty of behaving like the NHS. We prioritise only that which has become critical, when the amount of effort required to remedy the situation is so big, so draining of resources, that it triggers a train reaction in the organisation which makes everything much less effective and efficient than it would be with a little forethought and better management.
We never know what is around the corner. I could not have foreseen my appendix would burst. I was forced to stop and think and re-evaluate. For 10 days. I recommend it. Do not wait for a real health emergency to stop you. Give yourself proper time to pause and think. If you need help to ponder about yourself in a structured way, join us on the next Walk of Wisdom that you keep promising yourself. Or if you have a business issue, get your favourite consultant in to help you think through the problem before it gets urgent. But if there is even just mild pain in your business, attend to it now. Do something about it. Don’t wait until it does something about you.