Ten million medium gloves about to fall onto the floor.
There are boxes of unsterile gloves you can get that are dispensed individually, wrist end first. Most hospitals don’t stock them, even though they are widely available. I can only assume it’s because they are more expensive, and the bean counters won’t let us buy them. But when you consider how many gloves we lose as a whole bunch spill out when you’re trying to only get one or two, it’s madness. Particularly when half the time, people just pick up the pile on the floor and stuff them back in the box. (A grimacing face emoji would go here, if I could be bothered). Such a beautiful term, “bean counters” that conjures up visions of nameless, faceless bureaucrats for whom nothing is more important than the bottom line, with little knowledge of the coal face outside their office door. In reality I don’t know who these people are or if they’re a real thing.
But here’s another example.
We anaesthetists use sterile saline all the time in theatre, to mix up with drugs that come in a powdered form or to keep IV lines flushed and clear. We used to have 10 ml ampoules that you could just attach the syringe directly on to,
but then these newer ones appeared that were presumably cheaper. Yes, they are still 10 ml of sterile saline in a plastic ampoule, so a fabulous saving for the hospital. The trouble is, you can only access the contents using a needle attached to your syringe, which you wouldn’t necessarily otherwise need. And the needle costs waaay more than the savings you make by buying the cheaper brand.
Don’t even get me started on the brilliant savings made when they removed the stairwell besides the lifts when they built the new hospital (sneakily, after it had been signed off by the staff representatives who would actually be working in the hospital, some of us whom are still around, many years after the bean counters had taken their bonuses and departed), so that now everyone has to spend ages queueing for the lift, even if you’re able bodied and only have to go one or two floors. Another challenge for my mindfulness app.
Apologies if I’ve ranted about these things before, but some things deserve saying twice, even if just for emphasis. It’s absolutely not an indictment or your or my current mental acuity.