Neither here not there

I like being organised. I am quite happy to sit down and have a think about how to manage things in the most efficient and effective way, whether it’s exploring a new country over a few days or running your day-to-day management of patients. Some might call it being anal; I call it common sense.

I can’t say I plan things down to the slightest of details, but I do what I think is necessary. Which is why I get terribly annoyed when things don’t go to plan. I happily admit and do bear in mind that the best laid plans will inevitably go awry to one degree or another; what irks me is when it is due to individual culpability that could've been easily prevented.

Examples include individuals promising help and then withdrawing said help at the last minute without due consideration to one’s plan, folks being late and not respecting another’s time or the more common medical staff who don’t follow procedures because they were unaware of it or were just too inept or unwilling to learn about it. It is at this point that your imagination runs wild and you start to wonder if re-enacting a scene from a violent B-grade movie is worth the jail time.

Organisations, especially one as complex as the NHS (which happens to be the third largest employer in the world after the Chinese army and the Indian railway apparently) can only really run efficiently if appropriate systems are not only in place but are adhered to. If not, it’s like having all the laws in the world but with nobody bothering to enforce it (on that note, here’s an interesting letter).

I guess the lesson to take home is that one must always take into account the human factor in one’s considerations. And yet I am still undecided on whether humans are (generally speaking) intrinsically good or just selfish bastards.