Editor's Note: On August 11th, EMS1, Fitch & Associates, and the National EMS Management Association released their fourth annual EMS Trend Report, proudly sponsored by Pulsara. Because the articles and advice found within contain such critical subject matter, we've elected to publish each segment one at a time here on our blog. Read, enjoy, share, and take to heart the following information brought to you by the most prestigious thought leaders in EMS. Today's entry is written by Kris Kaull, B.S., NRP, CCEMT-P, FP-C.
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As COVID-19 continues to shape the landscape of healthcare, many profession-altering changes are here to stay. The most impactful of these is the paradigm shift to the “connected worker.”
While this may be a new term in healthcare, it has been covered extensively in manufacturing. As Natan Linder wrote in Forbes, “For years, we interpreted poor manufacturing outcomes to poor human performance (as much as 70% of mistakes in factories occur on human-centric processes). But things changed with the fundamental insight that humans aren’t actually the problem. Badly designed or overly complex work systems are.”
Healthcare faces even greater challenges. There was a time where a healthcare professional may have shined based on their clinical expertise alone. But this is no longer the case. I met with a neurologist in Seattle who told me that she makes, on average, 17 phone calls before she sees a stroke patient. Consider the time-sensitive tasks and coordination that need to be completed by a team in order to properly treat a critical patient: multiple phone calls, pages, answering services, handwritten notes, and radio communications.