Do you get a veto over every proposed change in your employers IT system that has any impact on you? No? Okay, that's the difference.
Covid testing - delays - what is the issue ? Just isolate
- Thread starter cmalone
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Either do HSE staff. Do you think they held a vote to decide to upgrade off Windows 7 or not??
No, but they, through their union, get to veto any substantive change or reform which would standardise everything from contracts to IT systems.
I do get a say, yes. But just in part of course, because I only manage a small part of a massive international infrastructure. But, in my company, I manage my piece for the enterprise, so the decisions my team and I make for the technology areas we manage affect all our sites around the globe. Where my efficient organisation differs from the HSE is that there isn't an equivalent of my role in every single office around the world, all getting to make their own decisions on how to address each requirement.
Where did I all say nurses, doctors or cleaners were the issue here, or all staff? It's clearly not all staff, but it's the hundreds of decision makers, the decentralised and duplicated decision making and multiple vested interests all putting themselves before everything else. My wife works in a front line role in one of the major hospitals, I get to hear all her frustration about repeated failures in decision making, purchasing and procurement. Remember the Dail printer scandal? She has multiple similar stories from her hospital alone. She's not in a management role, but is involved in decision making on major contracts because her direct managers who are the decision makers for that service in that hospital have no idea what they're doing, so they delegate and she does it because if she doesn't, they end up with equipment they can't use.
You seem to believe that HSE staff are not making purchasing decisions, who do you think does?
So you would introduce a piece of local technology that would mean that your part of the organisation couldn't talk to another part in another country and you would still have a job? You can have all the local staff you want making decisions on a decentralised basis but I bet you that you still have to adhere to 1000 policy and standard documents about what can be done and can't be done to ensure that there is some uniformity across the organisation in areas such as network security. Otherwise you would have entity in Country deciding that skype was great and another entity deciding that Zoom was great and then arrange a conference call. Does your company have a Chief Technology Officer? I bet he does and I bet he doesn't let you do what you want with your local infrastructure and technology at the expense of the entire company.
Most 'Staff' are not decision makers. The nurses and doctors just want to give the best care for their patients. The kitchen staff want to make the best meals. The admin staff want to ensure paperwork is accurate and processed quickly. The lab technicians want to ensure testing is correct. The IT system admin guys want to ensure everything works and is safe. The majority of 'staff' are not paid to worry about IT software or infrastructure budgets. Majority of staff don't have any decision making involvement in procurement or IT. They rely on highly paid senior managers of which there are plenty of them in the HSE to this for them and dictate strategy and budgets.
I am sure your wife those a great job. But I am also sure there are thousands of people just like her in the Health Service that don't deserve to be included in the term 'staff' when discussing HSE failures.. Just like I am sure that there are plenty of wasters like in every organisation. They work for a dysfunctional organisation that has been a football for politicians to kick around, a weapon for trade unions and a cash cow for plenty of parasitic private companies.
That's the problem right there, thaat perception.
In the HSE, or any State body, everyone effectively has a veto, through their union, over any real change. So the CTO or any other high level manager can try to introduce any change they like but if one department in one hospital or administrative centre doesn't like that change and gets their union involved then it doesn't happen. That's the reason for process duplication, inefficient system and waste which diverts resources away from where they are needed and causes those trolly numbers and kills people. Those doctors and nurses and administrators and technicians are, along with the managers who came from the same stock, the problem.
No, unlike the HSE, I'd be on a performance plan and managed out the door if I signed-off on something that wasn't fit for purpose. There's no way I'd be left in my position to continue making bad decisions that cost the company money.
Of course we have policies on what is, and is not allowed. They're not prescriptive to the point of becoming burdensome to comply with, but they ensure that I, and all others making purchasing or system specification decisions do so with full knowledge of the environment our solutions need to operate in. The HSE is sadly lacking in such clarity.
That's my whole point, we appoint a single person to be responsible for each service or technology for the entire organisation. We have a single person responsible for deciding on what conferencing tool we will use. They decide that, and every site adopts it. If they just suit the local needs and fail to take the wider org into account, that's considered a failure. People are people, we all make mistakes, but if those in decision making roles in my org don't learn from their mistakes, they are moved to a different role or they're managed out the door. In the HSE world, you can have every single hospital making their own decisions with no view on the wider org, with no repercussions for poor decisions, so the same bad decisions gade made time and time again.
Those thousands of people are still staff. We need to accept when people are critical of inefficiencies in the HSE, those criticisms are not being leveled at every single staff member. Many of those in decision making roles in the HSE worked their way up through the system, they are intimately aware of the shortcomings and challenges, but yet fail to address them.
Politicians certainly don't help, but they don't set the culture.
People can do a great job while also being part of the problem. If the current system or process is inefficient and you are blocking changes which would improve it then you are part of the problem. At the same time you could be working you ass off, going above and beyond, in the existing inefficient system.
Think of it this way;
You work on a production line performing two tasks which required you to move 20 feet every 90 seconds. There are 20 people performing the same task in the business and you are, by far, the fastest operator on the line.
Your boss proposed a restructuring of the production line which would move your two tasks 2 feet apart and thereby increase productivity by 25% and reduce headcount by 15%. You refuse to accept the change.
You are simultaneously the best worker there and the biggest problem.
In the health service those are the people responsible for patient deaths and long waiting lists.
Hospital tests give results within 8hrs because they have a lab they can walk to.
Others are using couriers to move the results to the labs. There is no central system to record tests.
So some test labs take longer than others - that is why there is inconsistencies depending on where you took the test.
Then again, if you are going into hospital, they test you at 8am the day before. You go in, take your test, and 4pm someone phones you to say if you have it or not. The problem with that is that this presume a) it isn't a false negative or b) the patient doesn't then catch covid19 in the interim, and goes into a non covid19 ward in the hospital where they then infect other patients and staff.
The same scenario is potentially possible also outside healthcare. You test everyone on Wednesdays, get the results Friday - but colleagues who happily tested negative on Wednesday went somewhere last night so they don't know that in fact they are positive, by which time they've already infected 3 or 4 others who also had negative tests and are going out tonight to celebrate.
Its essential we keep up social distancing and restriction movement as much as possible. Testing only tells you what you had on the day you were tested. But what happens after that is up to you.
By way of comparison - Denmark to roll out testing to the general population regardless of symptoms or risk status.
Yep, in a country with a lower per capita spend on healthcare than Ireland.By way of comparison - Denmark to roll out testing to the general population regardless of symptoms or risk status.
Their heroes seem to do a better job than our heroes.
At least one European country willing to learn from the outstanding work done by the South Koreans. They developed a virus test within days of the first case being detected, rolled out their "test and trace" strategy almost immediately and got cooperation from financial institutions and telecomms providers to share location and movement information.
They mobilised a nationwide network of testing facilities and were the first to implement the "drive-through" test centre concept. Not all their fast tracked testing was 100% accurate, but it seems it erred on the side of caution when reinfections seemed to flare up. These turned out to be c. 2.5% false positives in some tests.
The price for their outstanding performance was acceptance by the general population that certain types of personal data were available for test and trace and the pay-back was no shut down of their economy; slow-down yes but industry and vital services stayed operating.
This exceptional performance from a country closer to China than most of us (if in fact China is the source of the virus) and one that describes the Japanese as "lazy Koreans".
The Koreans as a nation were deeply ashamed of their performance during 2015 MERS outbreak and put plans in place to ensure they could cope better if future widespread health emergencies arose. Superb execution of an existing plan is what differentiated South Korea from most of the rest of the world who were left floundering, just like our pathetic so-called health service.
[EDIT: MERS is classified as a betacoronavirus]
They mobilised a nationwide network of testing facilities and were the first to implement the "drive-through" test centre concept. Not all their fast tracked testing was 100% accurate, but it seems it erred on the side of caution when reinfections seemed to flare up. These turned out to be c. 2.5% false positives in some tests.
The price for their outstanding performance was acceptance by the general population that certain types of personal data were available for test and trace and the pay-back was no shut down of their economy; slow-down yes but industry and vital services stayed operating.
This exceptional performance from a country closer to China than most of us (if in fact China is the source of the virus) and one that describes the Japanese as "lazy Koreans".
The Koreans as a nation were deeply ashamed of their performance during 2015 MERS outbreak and put plans in place to ensure they could cope better if future widespread health emergencies arose. Superb execution of an existing plan is what differentiated South Korea from most of the rest of the world who were left floundering, just like our pathetic so-called health service.
[EDIT: MERS is classified as a betacoronavirus]
Plan to antibody test a sample of the population being evaluated to start in June.
www.thejournal.ie
Study to test for coronavirus antibodies in the Irish population expected to begin in June
Dr Cillian de Gascun said a random sample of the population will be invited to take the test.
www.thejournal.ie
Does anyone challenge the utter balderdash these guys are coming out with? So many promises, all broken in terms of dates and test targets achieved.
The only way to establish the prevalence of the virus in the population is to conduct mass testing and then track and trace contacts for positive tests, Anything else is akin to the mathematical modelling nonsense that held the population in thrall but achieved sweet fanny addams in terms of preserving precious lives.
The only way to establish the prevalence of the virus in the population is to conduct mass testing and then track and trace contacts for positive tests, Anything else is akin to the mathematical modelling nonsense that held the population in thrall but achieved sweet fanny addams in terms of preserving precious lives.
The lack of testing is bizarre. We are only using a fraction of the testing capacity. People are not contacting GP's with symptoms. If they believe that the virus is still at large in a significant amount in general population without symptoms, then as you say we should be testing up to our capacity every single day. From listening to them, recent cases seem to be meat factories and care facilities. So just how many general cases of the virus are in the general population at the moment? Going by the numbers they are reporting, the economic cost we are paying is completely out of sync with the health risk currently seen in the Country.