Ships in the Night

A hospital floor is the design opposite of a Starbucks, substituting glaring lights for recessed, white and pastel for earth tones, steel for wood, and people in uniforms for civilians. Yet, if you look beyond the giant machines and small flashing lights you will find the same hushed one-on-one conversations where something important is said, or the time is passed.

Sit quietly and watch for a while at the people in uniform and you will see a disconcertingly unsafe process of ships passing in the night. As each person rotates through the room, hospital doctor, specialist, HMO doc, nurse for pm, nurse for morning, tech for pm, tech for morning, small bits of information about the patients desires, needs, problems, treatment options, and adverse reactions are partially recorded, partially lost, partially shared through electronic medical records that are hardly read, as though the internet, by analogy, had consciousness.

And as anyone who has read NTSB accident reports knows, catastrophe comes from a series of small human errors, someone didn't know something, misunderstood something, relied on a common practice in exceptional circumstances, wasn't assertive enough because they weren't in charge... With all its technology a hospital floor lacks the most important human factor"needed for hard cases, someone careful, conscious and watching, like air traffic control at O'Hare, assigned to each patient.