alt Hacker NewsThere's a great academic book called "Stupid Rules". Excessive rules (or KPIs - often rules in disguise) exist because we don't like authority.
Get the doctor to assess the nurse. Or the head nurses if you don't trust doctors. The nurses have managers, and if none of the doctors or head nurses can be trusted with a simple matter like assessing whether nurses are doing their jobs then you got bigger issues.
Oh no, the boss might play favourites if it's not an objective measure! Oh the injustice /s
But stupid rules or KPI also allow favourites. You can use an officious 30 point checklist and play favourites while ticking boxes. You can even rig "objective" data by controlling other factors (e.g. giving someone difficult customers do deal with).
Yeah, data driven would be nice, if you have good data. But data driven is a power tool. You don't measure SLOC or reward token use in software because of perverse incentives.
Replies
> Get the doctor to assess the nurse.
Definitely don't do this. I know doctors. I know nurses. Plenty of doctors view nurses as their slaves.
And besides, doctors aren't qualified. These are different roles.
When reading the headline I was thinking we were talking about evaluating things like whether a nurse asked the right questions of the patient from a best practices point of view (say you have <insert condition> and the best practices for that are to ask the patient about pain level and which side it's coming from and check in with them every X hours).
But evaluating tone and empathy? Great, now every nurse is gonna be wasting their time and energy making sure to recite the best canned, optimized text-adventure incantations for the KPI every time they enter the room instead of using their brains to see what the patient actually needs.
"Hello Mr. Smith our patients are our top priority at Kaiser and your nursing staff here at Kaiser Raccoon City are here to make sure you are cared for, comfortable, and safe. If you have any concerns or are feeling anxiety be sure to press the nurse button and we will be happy to assist you, we appreciate the trust you place in us and are eager to celebrate your recovery with you." < nurse now realizes Mr. Smith has been choking and losing consciousness while she was reciting that spiel >