Why I am not a hospital administrator

Recently I went to a management course and learned lots of useful things. Such as why I am a doctor instead of a manager. Why I don't want to be a manager. Why I like being a doctor and several closely allied concepts. Unfortunately I am a doctor and a manager and it is not a particularly good mix. Being a doctor in a fairly obscure and specialised area of medicine is really good because nobody has a clue what I am doing most of the time but everyone believes it is tricky. To reinforce this concept I can show people black and white squiggly scan pictures which are like psychotic rorschach tests and say that is a pulmonary vein and nobody is going to argue in case I am right and then they would look silly. So it is a pretty good lark and mostly I just drink coffee and chat to the baristas.
Well managing is different. For a start I never got a management degree but I got half a dozen medical ones. Secondly I am not sure a management degree would've helped anyway because those people that have them don't seem to be any more competent at organizing the chaos in the hospital than I am. But i suppose it is a way to get a student debt, which seems to be a popular pastime and gives you something to talk about with people younger than 30. But the most important difference between managment and doctoring is compliance.
Now compliance is a medical term for getting your patient to do as you tell them. There are several ways of improving compliance, such as being very persuasive or telling people to do things that they want to do anyway. Sometimes being clever helps. very occasionally being right helps, but less often that the textbooks would lead you to believe. Managing is however the true art of complience, because it involves getting people to do something you want when a) they dont want to b) they think you are wrong c) they were definitely not going to do that d) it does not sound like fun. Discharge summaries are a good example. It is a fact that general practitioners are obsessed with the concept that they have ownership over the patients that occasionally visit their practice and thereby have some divine right to know all about their most recent hospital admission even if it was delivering a baby. If they were that interested in babies why did they give up doing obstetrics in the first place, and if they were so sad about delivering their last baby why do they celebrate the event by having a month long golfing holiday in Scotland. Anyway someone has to write these boring novelettes. Using your imagination is discouraged and accuracy almost mandatory. A recipe for brain freeze. Various management strategies have been used. The most effective was incentives. It works really well. There were hundreds of discharge summaries and by paying someone to do them they were done in no time at all. But this involved a massive expansion of the 45 million dollar hospital debt to 45 million and 300 dollars.  So the next plan was to roster the junior doctors on to discharge summary duty. This resulted in a flurry of unusual illnesses such as st vitus dance, mongrelism and isipia. Actually I made the last two up, but as this is not a referreed journal I can make up anything.
Well it is midnight now and I am going to go back to work to deliver a baby. Actually I am just going to hang about and drink coffee and the woman is going to hopefully deliver her own baby but I will get the credit. But I think I am going to have an hour or two to spare, and I have just thought of an excellent management plan for the discharge summaries. It is a still night in Wellington for once and there is a touch of spring chill in the air. Just the night for a bonfire.

Blog 1

I have read Ruby's blog and have been persuaded to write one of my own. Maybe an uninspiring reason to start a literary career. At least there is a spell checker.
Ruby was attacked by a killer whale or some such aquatic mammal over the weekend in the catlins.
her Catlins are fine but she has a bad case of PMT which requires multiple bars of chocolate. Clearly the inspiration for harry Potter's dementors. I have a doctor friend in Scotland who claims to be JKs gynaecologist and he assures me she has wicked PMT, so I think that proves my point. He also claims to have been abducted by aliens but as I cant prove he hasnt been I will have to reserve judgement on his credibility.
The last time Ruby and I went to the Catlins it was winter and we went for a swim. The water was so cold that my bones ached and the old couple who live across the road from the beach and sell jam to tourists made us a cup of tea thinking we would drown or die of hypothermia.
Our designated driver ran over road cones in the hired car, and tried to cross the Clutha over the old bridge!
I have been on call for about 4 days in a row and my neurones have given up synapsing, so really this is a silly time for my inaugural blog.

Anyway I have to go to sleep now just in case any more babies decide they want to be born on a holiday. My eldest brother has his birthday today. As I grew up I always assumed that it was just another way that the eldest got everything, while the other 15 kids were left fighting over the scraps.

Now I know it is true.