I was off work for five days already, just long enough to forget how burned out this place made me last week, when Jane Sage called me at home Tuesday evening. Shoot. What did I do wrong now.
It was nothing I did wrong, but what I did right that she wanted to talk to me about. You see, I had spent the last couple years making a cheat sheet of ventilator graphics for myself to use mainly, but when I finished it was so popular around here that now everyone has a copy of it.
Anyway, one policy we have here is that nothing can be posted, filed or even hung on a bulletin board unless it is approved by the forms committee. So, I placed this cheat sheet on my bosses' boss about four times now, and nothing ever happened. However popular it is among my co-workers, the RT think getting it approved would be too much work -- or something.
Once I corned my boss, and she said, bluntly, "The writing is too small and this is much too complicated. If you want to use this form, you can just carry it on your clipboard."
I dropped the idea, until Jane called. My wife answered the phone when I was picking my son up from school.
"Dr. Aerial saw your graphics sheet, and he loved it," she said. "He said he wants one. He wants to understand graphics so people don't have to keep explaining them to him. He wants one of those sheets on the vents."
"Holy cow," I said, "You mean a doctor is actually interested in something I did."
It was true: ego up one notch from zero to one.
It seems we are making progress here at Shoreline, slowly but surely. Or, doctors have more power than my boss.
2 comments:
I have my students complete an assignment like this--I teach writing for health professions and have a lot of nursing and RT students and for a unit on professional writing, I have them pick something from their clinical placement that isn't explained or written effectively and re-design it. Their projects are often "cheat sheets" for procedures and are so well done and practical. It's nice to hear something like this getting respect!!
AWESOME. If only pediatricians would pass out user-friendly stuff like this for parents, during asthma diagnosis.
Why is it such a revolutionary concept, to make information easier to understand and implement? It's crazy how relevant this post is across subjects and industries. One of my English professors used to find examples of the worst corporate-speak and stick them on the overhead--then he'd ask one of us to "translate" the passage.
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