Dark magic

It was some years ago that I presented a lecture at one of our DES (dentistry, education & scones).

The lecture was called the Time Machine, and it was about saving as much time as you possibly could so that you had a life to do other things or to spend more on your work on other things that were better.

The time machine involved a description of my use of an Olympus Digital Dictaphone with an SD card transfer.

It was a discussion about how I dictated all my emails and all my case notes and all my letters and how it saved me the most extraordinary amount of time while also increasing the quality in all three of those areas of my life, making me look better externally.

I covered the questions about the GGC and contemporaneous notes and how that had been tested during my first GDC case, and everyone thought it was fine, and I explained to everyone that case notes and letters are done exactly like this by almost every single consultant in hospital work in the country.

At that time, I chatted to an audience about this, and most people looked at me goggle eyed, as if I was talking in a different language.

I don't think there was a single person from that audience who took on the tip, and they just continued to type their own emails and to type their own letters and to type their late case notes into the night as their wife or husband watched the television beside them on the sofa.

As the years have passed, more and more people seem to be drinking from a fire hose, and more and more people keep telling me that they're overwhelmed, and that the admin is killing them, and they don't know what to do.

So, here's the story again in simple form.

The Time Machine

• Buy the Olympus D series Digital Dictaphone with an SD card.
• Find someone in your clinic who's good at typing, and who’s keen to do something different in their work (do not outsource this to India, that will be worse).
• Set up a system so that you can type ‘see dictated notes’ into your case notes on the computer each time you see a patient (ask your nurse to do this).
• Set up a file that says email replies in your inbox on your email and give your email password to your typist brackets (you should never have personal emails on your work email anyway)
• Dictate into the SD card, when you're finished, insert it into your computer and transfer the file to a Dropbox file for your typist to pick up, type and reply.
• For the first little while, spot check some of your replies in your notes until you realise that they're better than you do them.
• Repeat until you retire.

The time that this will save you is extraordinary, and the quality of your case notes and your letters and your emails will increase exponentially.

I have no idea why nobody did it before, but I was chatting to the consultation masterclass guys, and I know that two of them at least read this blog (hello, Dan and Dan) and again, they looked at me with those goggle eyes and couldn't understand what I was doing.

I knew it was ahead of its time seven years ago when I presented this, but I didn't think it was ahead of its time now.

Guys, it's time to use technology to save some time.

Blog Post Number - 3390