Saving lives by design
If you are a medic, you will recognise much of this. If you are a potential patient, get worried. I have previously tried to explain this sort of thing to ‘hospital management’ but was met with the retort that this was all about academics wanting to highlight bad practices, so they could get ‘publications’. And anyway if you just think a little more, there is no problem. I am serious. There are lots of reasons for this paucity of insight, but here are a few.
First, one that looms large in the NHS and many health care systems is they are largely a subsistence culture. If you spend all your time just keeping up with the daily demands, there is no time to build or improve, or think about doing things better. We are not quite nomads, required to only use what we can carry, but there is not the space for innovation within the system.
Second, the word ‘design’ is not a part of the intellectual toolkits that underpin most medical research or medical schools. We ‘get’ science, but design, whether we are talking about building a medical curriculum or creating a learning environment, is not something that most medical schools live and breathe. Until we make the ‘Sciences of the Artificial‘ a set text, little will change.