Targets

This is probably my most well travelled blog post. I started writing it at work, then on the a13 and now in the hospital.

No, I'm not in the hospital because i was blogging while on the a 13, i was in a cab back then. At work, there's a catch 22. A horrible clash of performance and funding. We need to be well staffed to perform well, though the better we perform, the less the higher ups want to give us more staff. Why would they? If we perform well. Unfortunately, we don't. In fact, we fudge the books a little here and there. To make us seem better. Which inadvertently leads us to performing even worse since the impacts the aforementioned staffing issue. As such, we stagnate in a downwards spiralling toilet flush.

Wow, thats bleak imagery for work since im kinda loving it right now. But that's here and there. It doesn't change that changing figures is wrong and leads to people being done wrong. Not very obvious when it's done at my work place. All it makes at worst is people getting annoyed at having to wait to be seen by one of us. Big deal.

This culture of target driven work and such is applied across the board though. So what happens if the government legislate that patients who are diagnosed with cancer must receive treatment within x number of days after diagnosis? Well, then you just get doctors who delay giving patients scans so that the cancer isn't discovered until a later date so that they don't have such stringent workloads and tight deadlines.

So as i sit here, next to my mum who only got her ct scan by a miraculous mistake/novice doctor, I cant help but feel a little jaded. Had we not been told by our doctor to assume this was a minor stroke, we wouldn't have been prompted to send her to the hospital earlier the following day when she was feeling slightly unwell. Otherwise, we would have been waiting till the day after tomorrow for a ct scan. Just thinking that my mum would be sitting worrying at home uncertain about what was wrong with her while she had a lesion and excess fluid in her brain..? We've become quite pessimistic in this family, we're quite sure the doctors assumed cancer before they ran the tests to confirm. Vis a vis aformentioned doctor facts.

My brother and i spoke about things like this while he was down last week, in the run up to my mother's hospitalisation. While we were witnessing her deteriorating health and being pushed around by doctors who were laughably insisting it could be due to high blood sugar.

Imagine you run a pharmaceutical company and make billions on selling a drug. And you come up with a drug that works better and cures diseases amazingly quickly. Do you stop selling your current drug, which isn't as effective but sells bucket loads and makes you rich, start selling the new one which makes you less money?

Or do you withhold your new medicine and make loads of money???

Visiting hours are over now.