Shine, My Child, Shine

Today was a super long day at work. For the past 24 hours, I've been playing CSI:Dialysis Land. One of our patients experienced a traumatic experience yesterday, and my boss and I had to play detective to try to figure out whether their trauma was due to a faulty design or a user error. There's nothing like trying to piece together 20 different files and 3 different personal accounts of the story to try to figure out what really happened. On top of that, pictures of bloody tubing and parts don't mix well with lunch. In a way, sadly, it was kinda fun. The un-fun part was reporting our findings to upper management. Now, I feel that providing investigation results to "hot" issues is a chance to shine in the eyes of the management team. It's your chance to show these people that you are both calm under pressure and that you know what the hell you're talking about. I have no problem with either of these issues. I'm a fairly calm person and I can usually persuade most people just by being confident. Lord knows that it's gotten me this far, so I'm not ready to let go of it yet. Anyway, the part that I hate is that management expects you to make decisions that they are being paid the big bucks to make. The biggest decision out of every patient trauma is whether this risk is possible for all of our patients, and if so, what is the severity of it? These questions usually lead to other questions, such as what corrective or preventative actions need to be taken? From there, we have to make decisions on whether or not we need to recall anything or to stop anyone from treating. Now, I have no problem making decisions. The problem that I do have is that I don't have an MD. I can't make decisions on what kind of medical consequences will occur if the patient continues to treat on a faulty machine. As far as I know, they may die. Isn't that always the worst possible scenario? So for me, I always tend to lean towards the conservative side. I'm not a conservative person, but when other people's lives are at stake, I'll be as right-winged as I need to be. But management always disagrees with this. They don't want to take people off of their machines unless we can statistically show that these people are significantly at risk. I don't think that I need to show that 99% of the time, these people are going to get error X and die. If I can show at least one instance in which someone can get error X and die, then I think it's significant enough of a risk.

I look at these managers and wonder if that's who I'll be one day. Will I be waiting for a twenty-something year old to tell me what kind of decisions to make? Maybe. Just maybe. I'll give them their chance to shine.