Cleaning out my closet

I have been spring cleaning again, and found a huge stack of paperwork from my last assistant's job. Unfortunately some of it was data that I was supposed to input, that I thought I had done, but clearly never did.

I think the audit, data entry cum number crunching aspect of my last job was by far the worst thing. I had to go around all the clinicians in the area and collect their stats (appointment times, patients seen, diagnosis and a whole bunch of other nonsence). The psychologists, nurses and medics hated it and took great delight in shooting the messanger by making me wait extra long times to deliver this info. Then I had to spend afternoons at a strech entering this onto some massive pre 1990 database that was designed by Satan himself in the middle of a blinding hangover. I used to dread the last friday of the month as everyone would procrastinate and leave me to enter all the stats before the managers deadline.

I am not sure what these numbers did, or meant to anyone. None of them were ever used, and I think they went to some upper guy who pushed paper or crunched more numbers. Every once in a while we would get some meaningless feedback, like we were in the bottom 3 of the services within the trust, or we had worked at 76% effiency, but without knowing any context this was meaningless. Someone would have to be bottom in any comparison, regardless of being good or bad. 76% compared to what? What does 100% look like, what would 10% look like.

Didn't matter, we just got yelled at if the numbers werent put into the machine, so thats what I did. When they talk of NHS cuts in the future, they could save a huge pile of money and cut the people that push meaningless targets and deal with the numbers that make little sense to anyone. That and the utterly stupid, but no doubt expensive, David Brent style management workshops we had to attend where we all had to judge ourselves on the Myer Briggs (utterly non valid) and try to discern our personality by looking at shapes on a PowerPoint overhead.

So, this bundle of paperwork was missed. And nothing happened. The world didnt end, operations were not cancelled and old ladies did not die the street. Hmm. Perhaps there is a lesson there.