The quarterly update
from UKAS arrived in my inbox this morning. Yesterday I mentioned how the
good old days weren’t that good. Another way in which they weren’t good is exemplified
when I moved to a new place of work in 1984 after three years elsewhere.
“You can do blood groups?” asked
the chap in charge of the blood bank.
“Yes” I answered.
“Get on with it then” he replied.
And so, with no written instructions I
got on with doing blood groups in the way I’d been taught in the long-bulldozed
Royal East Sussex Hospital. After a few weeks and months it turned out that how
I was doing them was subtly different to colleagues who’d been taught in hospitals
in London, Tyneside, and various other parts of the world.
Were we all getting the same results…? Who
knows?
We all laughed at the idea of having
standard operating procedures, and were horrified at the thought of facing
accreditation when these were introduced in the early 1990s, but they were
needed.
Thirty years later we’ve now got the UK
Accreditation Service which seems to be trying to instill the same strange
practices into the management structures of many and varied diverse lines of
work. From my personal and narrow perspective it has lost sight of the frankly
wonderful achievements of thirty years ago.
We all do blood groups the same way at work. But
how we do them is still subtly different to how they are done in hospitals in London,
Tyneside, and various other parts of the world. Perhaps we as a profession
might be looking at standardizing nationwide and internationally? Is there any
appetite for that? I doubt it
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