When care is the context
The healthcare industry is, ironically, unwell.
Patients often feel like little more than statistics, especially if anything goes wrong. Doctors and staff often feel like little more than zombies, even when things go right.
Thankfully, not everyone is willing to accept the status quo.
Last week marked the occasion of the first Gathering of Kindness. It was an ‘unconference’ of health care administrators, doctors, nurses, medical students, patients, futurists, politicians, artists, musicians, and a ragtag assembly of other interested parties, including me.
The agenda was pretty straightforward. Bring together a diverse group of people and ask them to imagine what a kind healthcare industry might look like.
The fact that the question even needs to be asked when one dictionary definition of kindness is “not causing harm or damage” is somewhat frightening in itself, but the truth is that the dominant healthcare paradigm is a decidedly unkind one, which seems to treat patients as an inconvenience and staff as a resource to be bled dry.
If we’re to navigate our way out of this position, we need to understand how and why we got here in the first place.
As one contributor remarked; “As a profession, medicine doesn’t preferentially attract psychopaths and bullies”. (As a humorous aside, she added “In fact it generally attracts people who are extremely good at exams”). The unfortunate truth is that normal, caring people are indoctrinated into the pre-existing culture, eventually generating negative outcomes for themselves and the patients they’re supposed to be caring for.
I don’t have the time or space to write a thesis on the topic here, so while acknowledging that this is an enormously complex situation with literally millions of contributing factors, I’d like to put a finger on what I believe may be the root cause of the problem.
Healthcare has lost sight of its purpose. As Professor Don Campbell said at one of the breakout sessions I attended: “You can’t treat KPI’s as objectives.”
And yet, in healthcare (and many other industries), that’s exactly what we do. The advent of modern computing has allowed us to develop incredible analytical power. We can measure, track, compare and contrast data points of almost limitless variety, from the finest detail right up to global trends.
Where evidence-based leadership is concerned, of course this is a great thing. Through the smart creation and monitoring of KPI’s, we can minimise waste, maximise efficiency, and produce – in theory – better outcomes.
But what of those objectives that can’t be easily collected, measured, and tracked as values in a database? What is the cost of suffering, and how do you measure it, anyway? What is the value of wellbeing, and what are we willing to pay for it?
We’re experts on humans, but not humanity. We live in an age where health of the body can be quantified and maximised, but health of the spirit is completely ignored. This creates excellent results in spreadsheets, and a literal living hell in the experiences of the people whose lives those spreadsheets purport to measure.
It’s time to reframe healthcare. It’s time to make care the context.