Humanity in Management

This week the Commission on Improving Dignity in Care for Older people made a report that made recommendations to improve the care of old people in hospitals and the British National Health Service. Even though the commission was given a rather pompous name it raised some strong points. One of the most important of which is that older people are not treated with the respect, compassion and dignity that they deserve. Despite all the controls, management procedures and checklists extant in modern organisations something has gone wrong.

I posit that amongst all the controls and checklists we have forgotten our humanity and people are being treated like the computers that control our lives. A computer could not care less how you converse with it or treat it for that matter. It is just a machine that should be serving the will of the humans that created them. It is a tool which can make an organisation run very effectively if used properly. But when the machine is misused to create unnecessary bureaucracy it can clog up the "oxygen system" of the administration to create mindless systems which serve little or no purpose.

This is not just happening in the National Health Service and the caring professions it is happening everywhere. It is as if the system is being run by people who as so burdened by bureaucracy they have forgotten their humanity. It is time to re-educate ourselves and set an example to the very young in our schools of the importance of putting people first and the machine second.

We need to solve these problems not just by imposing further rules about how we talk to one another but how we act towards one another. Let the human beings be treated as sentient beings and the computers be treated as just machines and not the masters which are there to control us. Information Technology could then free all of us up to lead healthier and more constructive lives.

Paying lip service to improvements by trying to control the language we use will not really help. I would quite happily swap being called an "old boy" for a first class health service that met my needs. Action first followed by the niceties of politeness. You are what you do not what you say.