Challenging stimuli predicting the future

David Font
 

Photography by Alejandro García (EFE) 

I reread an article published in 2014 in the British Medical Journal, "A Glimpse into the Future: Typical day in the NHS in the year 2050", in which Hannah Wilson, a student at Imperial College, imagines a healthcare system that screens patients admitted to Singapore and New York from London, within the framework of a global hospital, and which operates on patients by remote surgeons using robots. The Euthanasia Department and the Genomics Clinic are, for her, hospital departments in 2050. She describes patients convinced of the suffering of two diseases when they know their genomic sequence and also "digitally addicted" patients in times when a day may end up in an isolation pod due to a virus raised to epidemic levels.

Is this the problem: too little (or no) innovation in service delivery?

Joan Escarrabill
 

Interdisciplinary team to evaluate patient experience

The meaning of words is sensitive to the determinants of space and time. The context gives meaning to the words. For example, what is the point of referring to cosmopolitanism as a remarkable quality when planetary interconnectivity is a generalized fact?(1) Without going into a debate about whether this "cosmopolitanism" is of any interest, can the same thing happen with innovation? The Mayo Clinic suggests that the main current problem is the lack of innovation in the provision of health services(2). The first question that this proposal suggests is whether innovation in the field of health has a "Darwinian" behavior, In other words, innovation is not linear, but is best explained by Stephen Jay Gould's (1941-2002) "punctuated equilibria" proposal: short periods of great agitation followed by long periods of calm or even lethargy(3). Maybe. Furthermore, perhaps innovation is not homogeneous in all fields.

Team stuck? The three factors to drive change successfully

Pere Vivó

Let's see if you recognize this situation: endless care agendas full of telephone visits that do not add value, repeated requests that do not follow a scheduling logic or a reasonable priority, few and highly complex face-to-face visits that take up more time than expected, tense situations with some patients and, finally, ending the day with a bitter feeling that the work is pending or poorly resolved...

If the answer is yes, you are in luck because your organization will need deep changes that can be an opportunity for transformation and collective motivation.

Improve the safety of your patients… share your ideas!

José Joaquín Mira

"But, if you don't know how this goes...!" "What are you in for?" "Shut up, you're better!" Expressions like these are common. They modulate the culture of our organizations and, although we do not give them excessive significance, they condition our behaviour. I don't know if it has happened to you, but sometimes we have the feeling that it is better to remain silent than to speak. Sometimes, the fear of being disliked, receiving a bad response, or receiving a reprimand causes us to keep quiet. In the workplace, there are hierarchies, unwritten rules, customs, and group dynamics that determine when and how things are done and what should and should not be said. But this way, the quality of care will never improve and patients will have a higher risk of suffering an adverse event. The culture of the organization contributes to speaking up or shutting up. Individual differences do the rest.

Shadowing for understanding the patient experience

Glòria Galvez

Reference: SoyArte

Who has not seen and cared for a patient who seems lost in the corridors of the hospital and asks for information from every person in a white coat that he comes across? It is likely that if a few days later you asked how it went, they would state that they are generally satisfied with the care, focusing their narrative on the most clinical part, or perhaps they could omit information of interest, giving the answers that he thought we expected to hear.