Hi there,
Many of you will know I’m a farmer’s daughter, and at this time of year the farm has a way of reclaiming me. The lambing shed becomes the centre of the universe for a few weeks, and it’s one of my favourite places to be.
Every year I look at it and am amazed how similar to human healthcare it is (with a bit more straw!). Every lambing shed is different. All farmers feed nuts to the ewes for example, but how, when, and where varies wildly. Some farmers feed twice a day, some once. Some scatter feed on the floor in big communal pens, others use troughs or tubs or barriers. Most put a ewe and her newborn’s into a smaller individual pen for a bit, a side room, essentially, but how long they stay there, and where that pen sits in the overall shed, is completely variable.
My dad is a shed builder (obviously ours is the best, I’m completely unbiased), and what he’s actually done over the years is quietly clock innovations from other people’s setups and bring them home. A new type of door here, a smarter layout there. Incremental improvements, borrowed from elsewhere.
However, he only sees the sheds empty. At lambing time, walking into another farmer’s shed is basically taboo. The infection risk is real and frankly you’re too busy for visitors! So farmers are isolated, working largely alone through one of the most intense periods of the year, with no real way to see how anyone else does it. The result is loneliness, siloed practice, and a lot of reinventing the wheel!
Clinical areas are the lambing sheds of healthcare. Theatres, emergency departments, community teams, mental health wards, they’re all doing broadly the same thing (caring for patients, managing risk, trying to learn when things go wrong), but the how varies enormously. And often, people in one area have no real idea how the team down the corridor, or in a different trust, or in a completely different sector, are doing things.
So, here’s my challenge to you – over the next few weeks, could you visit a different clinical area? If you’re in theatres, could you pop to a different theatre suite, in your trust or (shock horror!) another? What’s different? What would you steal? (Ideas, not kit. I know what you lot are like.)
How do we reduce the lambing shed silo in healthcare? I’d genuinely love to know what you find.
Thanks,
Lauren
PS – I wrote this during lambing time, covered in iodine (we put it on the lamb’s navels to reduce infection risk) questioning my life choices, and absolutely loving (nearly) every minute.
