I decided I needed to put every bullshit problem down on paper and send it to the director of the department. Cleaned up of course. A well thought out, concise, white paper with a list of concerns. My Treatise. I composed it over about 4-5 days total, first drafts, re-writes, etc, until I was happy with the finished product. I must say here by way of full disclosure that my wife was instrumental in proofreading and with toning down my rant to keep with general business decorum. She's corporate. I sent it off in an e-mail to the director, as well as cc's to the daily operations manager and the safety officer. The responses were positive and tempered by corporate logic, pretty much what I expected. The director forwarded a copy to his boss, one of the vice-presidents. He's a lot a things, stupid isn't one of them. If in the interim anything I warned about came to pass and he's sitting on my memo it probably wouldn't have been good for him.
The next significant event came in the form of a rapid improvement event (RIE) for our area. This is an offshoot of Kaizen and Lean Six Sigma. If you're unfamiliar with these management absurdities consider yourself lucky. Among other things, this is the thinking that you need to designate exactly where everything is to be placed in your physical work environment. No shit, these people are putting fucking blue tape outlines where everything is on your desk. Around staplers, tape dispensers, marks on the floors where the chair sits, it's FUCKING crazy. I am not making this up. One of the other parts of this is the RIE. This is where you throw shit against a wall and see if any of sticks. You look briefly at a process or workflow over the course of a few days or so, make a bunch of changes, then see what happens. It's really a ridiculous exercise, people following others around with stopwatches and counting steps. Where it all falls down is if you don't go back and revisit the process to see what helped (if anything), otherwise the people who work in the area are just stuck with a bunch of nonsensical procedures that only make things more cumbersome. People do whatever they can to avoid being part of one of these shit storms. I volunteered.
Here was my thinking. I had already laid out an outline of what would help in My Treatise. Nothing short of additional staff was really going to cut the mustard. If more staff was not an option on the table, and it usually wasn't, this would be yet another avenue to gets my thoughts on the record. I would just have to suffer through the week of nitpicking little shit like it was going to make any fucking difference at all. As it turns out changes in staffing were not being ruled out and I was able to manipulate things to get my plan the official recommendation of the committee. WTF! Things might actually change?
No. They wouldn't. Another made up budget/FTE crunch squashed me like the bug I am. Here's what happened. In a seemingly unrelated event a few months prior the hospital changed time accounting systems. Clocking in/clocking out that type of thing. With this change the administration had access to all kinds of new numbers, just the type of stuff that gives bean counters a hardon. They figured out that the pharmacy was averaging ten FTE's (full-time equivalents, basically an 8hr shift) per day over budget. Concerning-yes, but hardly a crisis if you consider this has been going on in perpetuity. Instead of trying to find out reasons why, there's a typical knee-jerk reaction. No new positions, no coverage for anyone who calls in sick, no extra pays shifts, did I mention knee-jerk? Pretty deflating. A few weeks later my friend who services the nursing homes calls. He has a job. I'm out.
Here we are a few months later. Dust has settled. In retrospect I have no regrets about leaving the hospital. It was the best move for me then, still is. I figure I did all I could there. You can bitch and moan about a job, which I did. You can try to affect a change, I did and almost fucking pulled it off. After that all you're left with is continuing to complain, sucking it up and doing the job, or moving on. I was prepared to suck it up, but an opportunity came along.
In a final note, 6 months later, the pharmacy department is in the process of implementing the changes. You're all welcome.
