Nurse here! This keeps popping into my mind, keeps leaving me drawing a blank. Healthcare is a massive and resource-devouring industry, but is stuffed with people who actually give a shit about the people around them: the industry is a good candidate for improvement, and the people in it are likely to actually embrace those improvements (well, barring the odd salty af mofo who loses their shit at the first signs of change, but that person’s in every industry - they’ll figure it out eventually.)
I work in a run-of-the-mill hospital in the US, which encourages staff to take on system improvement projects, and these are were I see potential - especially for new nurses gunning for promotions.
The problem is what and how. All I can think of are things like recycling programs to tackle medical waste, but (at my facility at least) the waste that isn’t already being recycled is either biohazardous or risks becoming biohazardous (like medication waste is huge, but we can’t save half a vial of unused injection due to the possibility of that being contaminated by the first needle that drew from it).
So, looking for project ideas, both that I can start to implement myself, or to suggest to other staff looking to polish their resume. Smaller scale stuff is great for newer nurses; big scale stuff I can throw at management and see what sticks.
Let me know if you think of anything! Thanks all!
I’m very biased towards thinking we need better systems thinking. Treat each patient like a the ecosystem we are, you know?
Mostly out of frustration on how as a sysadmin and a gardener I seemed to take more time to consider how various systems and components interacted with each other we making changes or addressing problems then most my life time of medical experiences. Those have been largely problem-fix type thinking, where you try to as fast as possible bandaid a problem and move it to “solved” as fast as possible.
To give you an example what that would look like to me (and my biases). Patient Bob comes in saying his ear hurts. You process him in, check his vitals, run some basic diags related to his ear canals, sinuses, etc. Cross reference his past health data. Cross reference public health data related to where he is and has been. If additional tests to help narrorow it down, get those done. Start a treatment plan.
That is unchanged largely. This is where the difference happens. His case is now on the backlog to follow up on. If this is an chronic condition then the doctor should follow up with specialists and work on a long term care plan and hospital reach back out to them when they need more information or have some more information on the long term plan.
This is true for ANY chronic condition or worrying diag result, until they are resolved.
If this comes down to “known issue, no solution” problem then a team that interfaces with Universities, pharmasuticals, medical equipment manufacturers, etc should be signaling to them they need to start researching/making something etc