Bureaucratic Idiosyncrasies

I may have just spelled my title wrong, but I don't want to worry about it at the moment. Anyway, I thought I'd share the latest red tape in the medical field: One of the Homeland Security mandates is that all hospitals in the U.S. have the same code "colors," like "Code Blue" for a patient in cardiac/respiratory arrest (probably a well-known code for anyone who watches medical TV shows). I suppose it makes sense, since that way you don't need to wonder which color means which emergency if you work in another hospital, but I don't even want to think about how much of my hard-earned money went to people who sat in a room and thought up different color codes for emergencies. I always thought I could mismanage my money far more effectively than the government can. But I digress...

So one day, I was running a lab test, and while waiting for it to finish, I looked at the brightly-colored poster with all of the standard codes on it. My eyes strayed to "Code Yellow," which means a bomb threat in medical-ese. I read through the standard advice, like, "keep the caller on the line as long as possible," "call security/police," "get as much detail as you can," "don't go near any suspicious packages," and "fill out the bomb threat reporting form..."

Bomb threat form? We actually have a bomb threat form somewhere in our facility?? Where is it? In the Bomb Threat Reporting Form file?? I considered casually asking my boss where the bomb threat forms were kept, but decided that might invite more trouble than I wanted.

I am more than willing to help out in times of emergency. But if someone does call my place of employment and informs me that there is a bomb planted someplace on the premises, the last thing I will be worrying about is which form I have to fill out.

And in the I Truly Feel Like a Number department, remember my bout with pneumonia? It wasn't enough that I didn't have enough sick time to cover the whole event, I discovered (or, more accurately, re-discovered, since I had read the policy and then filed it under "Idiotic Policies to be Ignored" in my mind) that even though I had a documented serious illness that almost landed me in the hospital, the documentation didn't matter. What mattered was the number of days that I was out of work. Each day that I was out of work for one serious illness counted as a separate unexcused absence (even for a documented medical condition). Never mind that I was hardly strong enough to make myself a meal, much less go into work and be effective. Apparently it also didn't matter that if I had been able to drag myself into work, I could have infected my patients--who are, by and large, suffering from a number of chronic illnesses and are also extremely frail.

The frustrating part of this is not so much that I am cocncerned about being disciplined (or, in the jargon, "written up"). My concern is that my employer has instituted a policy that discourages people with legitimate illnesses from staying home from work. If I, as a reasonably healthy, reasonably young woman can be incapacitated for close to a week with pneumonia, what does the administration think will happen to the patients who are much more frail than I am if I drag myself into work and expose them to whatever illnesses they have?

Oh, wait a minute. I think I just came up with an oxymoron: Administration thinks. Anyway, if I end up needing another job, I can just picture the interview: "Why did you leave your last job?" "Well, I was fired because I didn't fill out the bomb threat form and I stayed home from work because I had a potentially life-threatening illness." Sad, isn't it?

I have just about decided to dump the pursuit of my MBA. Although the school I have attended is an excellent one, I really think this world has more than enough managers and administrators, and far too few actual leaders.

Okay, rant over.

The sigline that I have on one of my favorite websites sums my current attitude up quite perfectly: "Lately it occurs to me what a long, strange trip it's been." --Grateful Dead