WhatsApp notifications in the middle of the night were the final straw. I switched those off – and every other alert – and it helped my wellbeing, sleep and parenting
You don’t want an incredibly tired person prescribing treatment for you or, worse, operating on you, unless you have some kind of death wish.
You want a proper call rota with the doctor “on call” and only the doctor “on call” to have their work phone ON and be available during their on-call hours.
That idea of yours would be perfectly fine if it was just you, but it isn’t: it’s you and all other people who think like you (or if they start by not thinking like you, they’ll change their minds when they see others who do think like that get prompt service whilst they themselves do they not).
That logic just leads to people who if they make a mistake can kill you or give you a problem for life (by prescribing your the wrong medicine or, worse, cutting the wrong thing whilst operating) being very tired and hence way more likely to make mistakes.
Having a single professional having to be on call 24/7 is very much a Tragedy Of The Commons situation - fine if only one or two people used that availability only for very urgent problems, a disgrace for everybody when lots of people innevitably use that availability for any shitty shit little thing.
That idea of yours would be perfectly fine if it was just you, but it isn’t: it’s you and all other people who think like you
Definitely not an “idea of mine”. That’s the US experience (I’m a doctor here). The US’s most common electronic medical record system developed a secure messenger app that replaced pagers so yeah for outpatient work most of the time-critical messaging goes through your cell. So no, I can’t be on DND 24/7. (I do have very aggressively tweaked work/personal/etc notification settings, but sometimes the urgent messages do need to come through after hours)
Well, I’m sorry for you guys to have to work under the worst of American management culture (the baseline of which, compared to Northern Europe and Scandinavia, is pretty bad).
Coming from a Southern Europe country and having worked in a couple of countries including Northern European ones, it’s my experience that a lot of those abusive work practices you see in Anglo-Saxon and Southern European management cultures are neither needed nor efficient, and instead are just the product of bad organisation (read: incompetent management) and employees enduring it under the mistaken assumption that “that’s just the way things are”/“there is no other option” because they’ve never worked in an environment with proper management.
If there is one thing that going to Northern Europe and working there taught me is that those things are almost never needed and most definitelly are not universally the way things are.
the more specialized the workforce, the harder it is to overcome staffing limitations. for example, in Italy, there’s a huge physician shortage (at least when I lived in Europe there was). You won’t fix that with simply changing the management culture.
From what I’ve observed when living in the UK and now that I’m living in Portugal, it’s shit management practices all the way up, with the politicians at the top being the worst managers of the lot.
But yeah, I can empathise with being in an work place were no matter what you do to try and manage your time to deliver your best (as the years went by in my career, I’ve learned various professional occupations which are are part of the “feed-in” for the main work I do, to quite an advanced level, merely as a means to improve my performance at delivering the right results at the right time, which is taking efficiency improving to quiet an extreme level), it just feels that all levels all the way up are working against you and that you’re just rowing against the current all the time.
Fortunatelly for me, I can just change employers and even countries if I think the overall work conditions are shit and I will never be able to properly manage my time, though I’ve noticed that plenty of medical professionals can’t, plus in my experience, when you’re snowed in by out of control inflows of work, you don’t generally have the energy to even start planning your way out of it.
That said, having moved from The Netherlands (whose management and work culture is generally very good) and into Finance in the UK (which is a pretty hectic and ill organised “shoot from the hip” environment), it’s perfectly possible to apply the techniques of highly organised and well managed environments in disorganised ones to produce superior results (in speed, quality and predictability of delivery timings) to those of everybody else there.
That said, I’m talking about Software Engineering here, which is a Logic+Creative area were you can “backup your patient” before you do something in case you make a mistake, unlike Medicine (though in Finance things can get “interesting” - read millions of dollars can be lost - if your code starts getting used by Traders and it’s not working properly). On the other hand one would expect that in Medicine, being properly rested in order to reduce the risk of mistakes is even more important.
No you do not.
You don’t want an incredibly tired person prescribing treatment for you or, worse, operating on you, unless you have some kind of death wish.
You want a proper call rota with the doctor “on call” and only the doctor “on call” to have their work phone ON and be available during their on-call hours.
That idea of yours would be perfectly fine if it was just you, but it isn’t: it’s you and all other people who think like you (or if they start by not thinking like you, they’ll change their minds when they see others who do think like that get prompt service whilst they themselves do they not).
That logic just leads to people who if they make a mistake can kill you or give you a problem for life (by prescribing your the wrong medicine or, worse, cutting the wrong thing whilst operating) being very tired and hence way more likely to make mistakes.
Having a single professional having to be on call 24/7 is very much a Tragedy Of The Commons situation - fine if only one or two people used that availability only for very urgent problems, a disgrace for everybody when lots of people innevitably use that availability for any shitty shit little thing.
Definitely not an “idea of mine”. That’s the US experience (I’m a doctor here). The US’s most common electronic medical record system developed a secure messenger app that replaced pagers so yeah for outpatient work most of the time-critical messaging goes through your cell. So no, I can’t be on DND 24/7. (I do have very aggressively tweaked work/personal/etc notification settings, but sometimes the urgent messages do need to come through after hours)
Well, I’m sorry for you guys to have to work under the worst of American management culture (the baseline of which, compared to Northern Europe and Scandinavia, is pretty bad).
Coming from a Southern Europe country and having worked in a couple of countries including Northern European ones, it’s my experience that a lot of those abusive work practices you see in Anglo-Saxon and Southern European management cultures are neither needed nor efficient, and instead are just the product of bad organisation (read: incompetent management) and employees enduring it under the mistaken assumption that “that’s just the way things are”/“there is no other option” because they’ve never worked in an environment with proper management.
If there is one thing that going to Northern Europe and working there taught me is that those things are almost never needed and most definitelly are not universally the way things are.
the more specialized the workforce, the harder it is to overcome staffing limitations. for example, in Italy, there’s a huge physician shortage (at least when I lived in Europe there was). You won’t fix that with simply changing the management culture.
From what I’ve observed when living in the UK and now that I’m living in Portugal, it’s shit management practices all the way up, with the politicians at the top being the worst managers of the lot.
But yeah, I can empathise with being in an work place were no matter what you do to try and manage your time to deliver your best (as the years went by in my career, I’ve learned various professional occupations which are are part of the “feed-in” for the main work I do, to quite an advanced level, merely as a means to improve my performance at delivering the right results at the right time, which is taking efficiency improving to quiet an extreme level), it just feels that all levels all the way up are working against you and that you’re just rowing against the current all the time.
Fortunatelly for me, I can just change employers and even countries if I think the overall work conditions are shit and I will never be able to properly manage my time, though I’ve noticed that plenty of medical professionals can’t, plus in my experience, when you’re snowed in by out of control inflows of work, you don’t generally have the energy to even start planning your way out of it.
That said, having moved from The Netherlands (whose management and work culture is generally very good) and into Finance in the UK (which is a pretty hectic and ill organised “shoot from the hip” environment), it’s perfectly possible to apply the techniques of highly organised and well managed environments in disorganised ones to produce superior results (in speed, quality and predictability of delivery timings) to those of everybody else there.
That said, I’m talking about Software Engineering here, which is a Logic+Creative area were you can “backup your patient” before you do something in case you make a mistake, unlike Medicine (though in Finance things can get “interesting” - read millions of dollars can be lost - if your code starts getting used by Traders and it’s not working properly). On the other hand one would expect that in Medicine, being properly rested in order to reduce the risk of mistakes is even more important.