I attended the virtual Leadership Conference this past month, and listened to Tom Woller’s John W Webb Lecture Award with some interest. I especially appreciated his itemization of lessons he had learned from the past, which caused me to think about lessons I had learned from my past.
While Tom’s lessons seemed to have been learned from good experiences, I have to confess that my lessons came mostly from mistakes I made. One of those was defending the way things were.
You see, I had the privilege of working with a truly inspiring leader who brought in a colleague of his from the military who was an industrial engineer. The goal was to have this person look at the pharmacy operation and suggest ways it might become more efficient. This person was quiet, observant, patient, and, over a period of several days, watched things happening in the pharmacy. Once or twice a day he would come into my office and ask questions about what he had observed. He accepted my explanations without comment, and went back to observing my staff at work. He was so unobtrusive that my staff quickly forgot he was there except when he asked them questions about what they were doing.
After about a week of observation, he arranged an appointment with me and offered his observations and suggestions regarding how we might make our operation more efficient. One-by-one he laid out his observations and suggestions; one-by-one I invented arguments as to why they wouldn’t work.
In fairness, some of what he suggested, though sensible, contravened state pharmacy law. But I have to confess that most of them did not. I just couldn’t bring myself to accept that things we had been doing for so long might not be optimal. One of those suggestions was to move cart filling to midnights, which you may recall we wound up doing from my
previous blog, but that was long after his visit.
It was only later that I came to realize that a lot of our practice is not designed, but is, rather, evolved. Often it is often simply our habit of taking something that works in one part of our practice and adapting it to something new that we have to do, often without questioning if it is the right thing to do.
I have observed this to be especially true when we automate functions; our natural desire is to overlay automation on top of our current manual processes. It’s rather like getting a power saw, and then trying to use it like a hand saw.
And so, dear reader, I would like to encourage you to use opportunities for automation as opportunities to seriously rethink the way you process your work; not just in terms of how to make processes faster and safer, but also in terms of what processes might no longer be necessary, or might actually be counterproductive.
There can be no question that such changes can be painful; we are all biased by a preference for the familiar. Indeed, in my experience, those whose social position in the pharmacy is predicated on their mastery of the current system may find the changes especially painful. But, like the power saw, automation is a power tool. And you use power tools differently than you use hand tools, or you lose their benefits.
As always, the contents of this blog reflect my own opinion and not necessarily those of ASHP or my employer, BD.
Dennis A. Tribble, PharmD, FASHP
Ormond Beach, FL
DATdoc@aol.com