The darker side of being a doctor (2017)

I think there is unstated subtext perhaps in your criticism. To one extent, a unions job is to care about its members. It is _not_ the unions job to care about anyone else. If the union acts in the interest of anyone other than its members, it is not doing its job. I think that criticism is more of a definition almost. The seamstress union was not created to care about the CEO and managers, but seamstresses.

It's hard to say a bit whether union benefits always do come at everyone else's expense. I'm reminded of the argument against $15 minimum wage. According to one third of business owners in 2021, it was going to cause layoffs. [1] That did not happen in Seattle where that was tried, instead the data shows: “Seattle’s minimum wage ordinance appears to have delivered higher pay to experienced workers at the cost of reduced opportunity for the inexperienced,” [2] Despite the data, there is still the claim that mass layoffs would be necessary.

I think this perhaps dovetails into the debates of trickle-down (AKA supply side economics) vs bottom-up economics. Be what it may, not everything union is good, yet you can still thank them anytime you have a weekend. [3][4][5] I'm just saying, be cautious when painting with a broad brush. The idea a union helping its members will always be at everyone else's expense strikes me as an anti-union talking point rather than something grounded in firm data. Could be true, but without citation showing that to actually be extensively true, I do not take that statement at face value.

To be sure, the _only_ claim I'm making here is that a union and professional union are not the same thing. I'm super skeptical of all these other claims/statements being made and am not really willing to accept anything on face value here without evidence, particularly broad generalizations. The points I raise I think bring some refutation to those generalization, which does not mean the inverse is true, but simply that those generalizations are neither helpful nor informative.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/10/one-third-of-small-businesse...

[2] https://fox59.com/news/heres-what-happened-when-seattle-rais...

[3] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/sep/09/viral-imag...

[4] https://www.unionplus.org/blog/union-made/eight-reasons-than... (this source is very biased)

[5] https://www.pbs.org/livelyhood/workday/weekend/8hourday.html

edit fixed citation links, one was missing. Added more citations in support of claim that unions are to thank for the weekend (please correct my history if wrong, my point is that historically, in the concrete, unions have done some really good things [assuming you believe not working an average of 102 hours per week is a good thing as was the case for building tradesman in 1890 [5])

It is not all doctors, but also other personell at hospitals. But also doctors. Some are known to take too little blood from patients to run proper tests. Or too little urine. Or use the wrong containers for the samples. All very avoidable, if people did not refuse to learn abour their own job's processes. People can be, and are often very learning resistant, especially non-technical people, when it comes to learning technical processes, new software, or new workflow processes.

What is more is, that hospitals run on lots and lots of proprietary machines. But they do not always run them correctly. No, even when being told, that the machine must not be in a room warmer than X degree Celsius, they run them above that temperature anyway. Sometimes without better option, because they do not have the appropriate rooms for running them according to how they should be run. Don't get me started on proprietary protocols and file formats, probably wheel-reinvented by an intern or an evil genius, who was told to make interoperability with machines and programs of any other manufacturer impossible.

Yes, you may be a well-oiled team running the place at work, but some of what you write makes me think, that you are part of the problem, refusing to put things into written form. In software engineering many (but not enough yet) have long learned, that what you do not document properly will eventually get lost and might need to be rediscovered. If you cannot write down your thoughts regarding a patient, what happens, if the next day you have an accident and cannot tell anyone your custom interpretation of measurements? What if your coworker or fellow doctor, who understands all your subtle signaling like some raised eyebrow, cannot make it to work tomorrow? And do you really want to handle patients based on whether your coworkers eyebrows behaved, when you were talking to them on shift change/handover? I hope not.

Basically what you describe sounds like a very person dependend process and leaves lots of room for mistakes, when things are not explicitly spoken or written. It may be, that inputting everything into some IT system takes a lot of time. Maybe you need better methods of inputting things. It is a valid concern. But your kind of attitude "tech will never be able to capture our work" is not helping anyone. A good solution will naturally involve countless hours of observation of processes in the hospital. That is what business process modelling is all about. Of course the process needs to be captured and analyzed. That however, is a 2-way street:

Sharing all the little signals and what they mean with some observer of processes is essential. They needed you to tell them these things. If you think the tool is "fisher-price", then why haven't you told the people, who came up with the solution? Did you sit there silently, saying nothing? If so, then who is wasting other people's time? Or did no one actually observe the processes and came asking about your work and how you do things? If so, then that is a really bad process of trying to improve things and I am sorry you were treated badly and not not surprised by the result.

Who thinks that they can solve all the problems without observation will fail, especially in a hospital. But that is not the matter I was getting at. I don't know where you are a doctor or so, but at least from the stories I get to hear from the hospital, I know that hospital staff has lots to learn in terms of following processes and saving time by knowing a little bit about the work of other departments, like the lab.