A little while ago in the Clinic a patient asked me if we provided insurance for problems and failures related to dental implants.
I explained to the patient that the dental implant was guaranteed by the clinic for 10 years and that included accidental damage, failure for biological reasons etc etc.
To some people this sounds ridiculous, but we’ve now been running this process for 10 years and was very not ridiculous on a commercial basis.
The patient was still adamant though that they wanted some insurance for the implant and so I was asking them what they wanted insured against.
They didn’t seem to understand that the guarantee itself was insurance and if they should take out insurance and pay for further insurance (which we don’t provide obviously) they would be extraordinarily overinsured.
Jump forwards a little bit and I was working in the shed in the back garden (one of my favourite places now) and I went in to make myself a cup of tea to find Alison working at her laptop at the breakfast bar in the kitchen where she likes to work when she’s at home.
Let’s stop for a minute to consider what Alison’s job actually is.
My wife is a Macmillan nurse for children with cancer.
She’s a paediatric oncology outreach nurse who looks after children from diagnosis to completion of their treatment in whatever form that might take including palliative care.
She goes to schools, homes and other places that the children who are under treatment go. She prepares friends and family, teachers and all sorts of people for the road that is ahead and helps them navigate the road that comes in front.
She provides end of life care in people’s homes when the worst thing happens to children through this disease process.
And so, she has a proper job and not one that replaces peoples missing teeth for vanity or the ability to eat a stake a bit better.
So, as I walked into the kitchen from the shed to make my cup of tea, she was watching a video on her laptop about what to do if she encountered a suspicious package.
There was much information in this video as I stood behind her and watched it for a few seconds including the fact that you should not use your mobile phone within 15 metres of such a package, but you must keep it on in case you have to run somewhere else to phone someone when the bomb goes off.
She was also told that she must always try to make sure that she’s 100 metres from said package even though some of the information was telling her what to do if she was 15 metres from the package.
The voice was terribly monotonous, and it looked a little bit like a real comedy meme which was about to come to a punchline.
It turned out this was part of her mandatory training which was taking up 3 ½ of her day but she had to answer pre questions on suspicious packages followed by videos, followed by an exam at the end to make sure she’d understood and that was one 30-minute module of a 7-module package.
My wife is contracted for 10.5 hours a week.
And there are children dying of cancer.
And so, Alison is not able to keep her job unless she completes her mandatory training to be able to deal with a suspicious package, which may be an explosive and to learn that she must not use her phone within 15 metres of that package in case by some freak chance the radio waves from her phone actually caused the package to explode.
There has never been a bomb that has ever detonated in a British hospital.
If you were a terrorist organisation looking to create terror or ever bring a population towards your way of thinking, it’s unlikely that you would choose a hospital in which to detonate your bomb in an indiscriminate nature.
The people’s front for the liberation of the public from the trauma of hospital care is not yet a big enough and sophisticated enough organisation to start taking down ‘hospitals.
While there is a theoretical risk to all of us that we may encounter a bomb in a public area as has happened many times in the UK and most notably through the 1980’s during the paramilitary campaign by the IRA it’s a pretty low risk at the present time in a hospital reception.
And so, we find ourselves in a world where much of our time is spent insuring ourselves against stuff that has such a ridiculously small chance of occurring that wastes such an extraordinary amount of time (the irony of the fact that I’m writing a blog about it is not entirely lost in me).
And so, my main and overriding feeling related to this is that I am blessed.
I am lucky enough to steer the ship in our place and to decide, as the owner and leader of that business, whether I inflict upon my team suspicious package training.
I can tell you today that as a business we have taken a view not to inflict that upon our team and therefore I will take the punishment for not doing that should the worst thing happen.
It’s also perhaps worth remembering that that mandatory training that Alison was undertaking was nothing, absolutely nothing to do with safety in a hospital environment.
It was a corporate risk strategy.
Teach the team to manage a package and make them tick a box (and this is what they have to do) to say that they feel competent and when the bomb actually goes off, blame the team for not doing that which they were trained therefore the corporate is protected.
Leadership doesn’t mean creating reems of training for people so that you have protected the organisation. Leadership means making the decision that people don’t have to do that and understand that if and when the terrible thing happens you will be behind people to help them.
Blog Post Number - 3257