Welcome to Health Care POV | sign in | join

BROWSE BY TAGS

All Tags » Professionalism   (RSS)
Stepwise Success

Accountability
May 22, 2009 7:07 AM by Scott Warner
Accountability is a word I hear a lot these days, usually in the form of "That person needs to be held accountable." I think what people usually mean is "That person needs to be punished." But accountability simply means to be answerable. One who is accountable Read More...
2 comments »     
A Thousand Words
May 18, 2009 6:21 AM by Scott Warner
Incident reports are commonplace in healthcare, meant to record the facts. But do they? I've written about write-ups, including their presentation as conclusions and use as political bats. If you've worked in healthcare any length of time, you're well Read More...
2 comments »     
Early Lessons From H1N1
May 6, 2009 6:22 AM by Scott Warner
The other evening as I sat in the bleachers of our local school waiting to watch my son perform in a concert, a friend said, "I checked your hospital web site for information about swine flu, and the number of cases wasn't accurate." My friend wasn't Read More...
0 comments »     
At the Local Level
May 1, 2009 7:08 AM by Scott Warner
All disasters begin and end at the local level. That's also true for swine flu (H1N1). Your local response is critical. As our hospital's Safety Officer, I'm involved in local planning and also part of our Incident Command System (ICS) structure, created Read More...
0 comments »     
Because You Provide a Service
April 13, 2009 4:41 AM by Scott Warner
There are two answers to any question about customer service. The first is Because we provide a service , which defines it from the company's point of view. The second is nearly identical: Because you provide a service. Here's a scenario at two hospitals: Read More...
0 comments »     
Tune It Out
April 3, 2009 6:25 AM by Scott Warner
Workload, telephone calls, STAT orders, interruptions from colleagues, instrument breakdowns, the boss yelling, patient complaints, the frequency of abnormalities and random error conspire in infinitely complex ways to drive us crazy. How do we keep distractions Read More...
0 comments »     
I Have To Take This
March 19, 2009 9:02 AM by Scott Warner
A nurse in a patient's room hears a ringtone from her pocket. A lab tech crossmatching blood hears her cell phone ring from the break room. And a lab manager's phone rings during a job interview. Incredibly, in each case the cell phone is answered. "I Read More...
1 comments »     
The Year of Blogging Dangerously
February 19, 2009 11:11 AM by Scott Warner
"If you are thinking of starting a blog--work related or not--ask first. There are likely opinions about what can be said," I blogged in my first entry . But what has really happened in the last year? While I suspect our hospital administrators never Read More...
0 comments »     
Why Make Patients Wait?
February 11, 2009 1:39 PM by Scott Warner
We recently consolidated laboratory workstations, creating a second order entry station in the process. This opens the possibility of bypassing the normal patient queue of order entry before collecting samples and drawing some patients as soon as they Read More...
0 comments »     
I Got My Answer From the Nurse
January 28, 2009 3:02 PM by Scott Warner
A hospital receptionist concerned about a lab report on her son came into the lab asking what a "bicarb" level meant. I printed a page from Lab Tests Online , a resource I often use for patients. When I walked it down the hall to her desk, she was putting Read More...
4 comments »     
Communication
January 22, 2009 8:53 AM by Scott Warner
Communication is everyone's panacea for everything. - Tom Peters , author of In Search of Excellence Ain't that the truth. But communication is also blamed for much failure. Management with tsk, "If only we had had more meetings, more blurbs in the newsletter, Read More...
4 comments »     
Paperless
January 9, 2009 12:39 PM by Scott Warner
We should be paperless by now. We have computers, interfaces, scanners and nursing point-of-care software. It should be easy. Yet we save instrument tapes of interfaced results, save work logs of microbiology specimens and print dozens of specimen labels Read More...
6 comments »     
The Purpose of Discipline
December 16, 2008 8:39 AM by Scott Warner
"The purpose of discipline," a nurse once told me, "is to correct behavior." According to one article in HR Magazine , the purpose of discipline is "to create and maintain a productive, responsive workforce" to "rehabilitate" employees. And one human Read More...
1 comments »     
Millennials and Perennials
November 20, 2008 8:11 AM by Scott Warner
According to a Wikipedia article about them, 97 percent own a computer, 94 percent own a cell phone and 76 percent use instant messaging. Morley Safer described them on 60 Minutes as arriving at work around noon in flip-flops, expecting a manager to talk Read More...
13 comments »     
Does Attitude Matter?
October 30, 2008 10:54 AM by Scott Warner
As a squadron leader in the Air Force, I was passed for promotion from yellow to red rope (we wore different colored shoulder ropes) over a less qualified, less experienced candidate. I stewed about this a few days until finally asking the Non-Commissioned Read More...
0 comments »     
« previous page  |  next page »