Broken Cultures in Health Care

One of the problems in health care
is that we have broken cultures in health care.
And that senior doctors
or especially hospital administrators
don’t know what their job is.
When you ask them, “What’s your priority?”
They say “patients.”
No, it’s not.
It’s to take care of the people who work in the hospital.
You take care of the people who take care of the people.
That’s what you do.
Every administrator and every senior doctor and senior nurse
should be preoccupied with one thing and one thing only:
are my doctors OK, are my nurses OK, is my staff OK?
And if you get that right
they will devote all of their time and energy
to taking care of each other and the patients.
The problem is we have cultures
in which they think money is more important
or patients are more important
or anything else other than the doctors, the nurses and the staff.
And so the doctors, the nurses and staff are forced every day
to spend time and energy to protect themselves
from their own leaders
and take energy away
from doing the right thing for the patients.