Tuesday, November 02, 2004
TLAs - bane of my life
Well the first day at "work" was mind-numbingly boring, with the usual cascade of fire-safety lectures and work-improvement lectures washing by a heavy-lidded re-minisce nodding gently off to sleep.
One thing that struck me was that they may have fancier names over here, but everything's the same.
"Hospital improvement" hinges about a "PDCA" cycle (plan, do, check, act) whilst in the UK it hinges about an audit cycle. They're exactly the same thing, except one is a four letter abbreviation and the other is an actual word.
It strikes me that Singaporean healthcare professionals, and singaporeans in general are unhealthily fixated on TLAs (three lettered abbreviations). Maybe it give us a sense of uniqueness - we must be special, since nobody else can understand us. The justification is "time pressure", but how much time does one save with a four-syllabled abbreviation, when much of the time each of the individual words can be truncated into its first component syllable?
So I sat through the lectures yesterday with a growing sense of frustration, asking the hapless doctor next to me (an ex-classmate) What's this? What's that?! and getting gradually pissed off as I heard about how we had to use the HDI to invoke EMRS and get the PRD up to date.
Durrrr.
If we think we're making ourselves sound more professional then we're sadly wrong. It just makes us sound soul-less and mechanical.
One thing that struck me was that they may have fancier names over here, but everything's the same.
"Hospital improvement" hinges about a "PDCA" cycle (plan, do, check, act) whilst in the UK it hinges about an audit cycle. They're exactly the same thing, except one is a four letter abbreviation and the other is an actual word.
It strikes me that Singaporean healthcare professionals, and singaporeans in general are unhealthily fixated on TLAs (three lettered abbreviations). Maybe it give us a sense of uniqueness - we must be special, since nobody else can understand us. The justification is "time pressure", but how much time does one save with a four-syllabled abbreviation, when much of the time each of the individual words can be truncated into its first component syllable?
So I sat through the lectures yesterday with a growing sense of frustration, asking the hapless doctor next to me (an ex-classmate) What's this? What's that?! and getting gradually pissed off as I heard about how we had to use the HDI to invoke EMRS and get the PRD up to date.
Durrrr.
If we think we're making ourselves sound more professional then we're sadly wrong. It just makes us sound soul-less and mechanical.
