.Dust

For sev­eral dif­fer­ent rea­sons that I pre­fer not to share with you read­ers, I spent part of my life (dur­ing the last 20 years) sit­ting apart of my wife’s bed in a hos­pi­tal. Noth­ing so tragic or sad, every time it was about sched­uled oper­a­tions, sim­ple sur­gi­cal treat­ments usu­ally, so I think I could be con­sid­ered as an expert in mat­ters like “waiting in a hos­pi­tal ward”, or “walking along hos­pi­tal cor­ri­dors”, or “staring at the ceil­ing wait­ing for the doc­tor to come”. In my per­sonal opin­ion I noticed that no inno­va­tion at all appears in Health Care in a time frame (1985−2007) that led human being to mobile phone intro­duc­tion and dis­sem­i­na­tion, per­sonal and portable com­put­ing explo­sion, and inter­net birth and propagation.

I’m sure that med­ical treat­ment and pro­ce­dures became more and more effi­cient and allowed more and more peo­ple to live a bet­ter and longest life­time. I’m talk­ing about build­ings, rooms, even peo­ple, that wel­come patients in the same way as twenty years ago, with the same sad aspect and pro­ce­dures, no inno­v­a­tive ideas for suf­fer­ing patients, and no for rel­a­tives at all.

Some of the most impres­sive and long last­ing con­di­tions could be clas­si­fied in cat­e­gories:
(1) “the tv set does not work”: it means all the “innovative” devices that ranges from tv to radio or warn­ing sign but­ton, inter­phone, that don’t work and remain neglected into your room
(2) “patient requests are ignored”: it means, in most sit­u­a­tions, that there is no way for nurses and doc­tors to record who you are and, mainly, that you asked for some water three hours ago, sorry sir, nurses changed and your request was unfor­tu­nately for­get
(3) “furniture”: it means all of the stuff that sur­round the bed, and that are few and essen­tial in help­ing the patient to under­stand that… yes, this is a room.

I’m sure that huge and inno­v­a­tive steps are daily made in Med­ical Sci­ence for human’s sake, it’s strange for me that part of the intel­li­gence we use for this pre­cious task could not be applied to improve patients expe­ri­ence dur­ing the short (hope­fully) period they have to spent for pass­ing through pains and enjoy their life again.

Why do I blog this?
My wife (and I) had the (bad) luck to visit hos­pi­tals abroad too, not only in Italy, and it seems that all of these places look the same, same rooms, same peo­ple, and the same sad atmos­phere. It’s such an Uni­ver­sal mood that could be kind to change.

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Related posts:

1. Sources of uncon­ven­tional innovation
2. Inno­va­tion is everywhere
3. How hard is to push innovation?
4. The four dri­vers of innovation
5. Com­mu­ni­cat­ing Innovation