Excess bureaucracy, when the procedure is not a good thing

A sixteen-year-old girl enters a hospital with a high fever, coughing fits, and chills. After two days, she is discharged, returns home, and dies . The first response the hospital doctors gave to the investigators in charge of the case was very curt and succinct: " We followed the procedure ."

EXCESS BUREAUCRACY

Faced with the need to navigate the stormy sea of chaos, of overlapping emergencies, also due to the fact that we have lost track of time and are punctually in distress, prisoners of an eternal present , we have discovered a small trench, tailor-made for inert man, within which we can still protect ourselves. Procedure. And if procedure dictates, we must only obey, regardless of any form of individual responsibility, and any gesture of necessary courage.

EXCESS BUREAUCRACY IN ITALY

The concept of procedure is simple. You can find it explained in a few words in the Treccani dictionary . It is a way of proceeding and behaving in certain circumstances, effectively through a series of automatic processes, to achieve a certain result . Be careful: follow the reasoning, and don't forget the procedure's ultimate goal. The result, not its opposite, as in the case of the sixteen-year-old girl who died due to improper hospitalization.

Due to its unbridled and compulsive use, a waste of our natural resources, the procedure has become an alibi . A way to wash one's hands. To avoid taking on responsibility, or at least to dodge it. To be indifferent. It's no coincidence that it's a word we find ourselves facing, like a wall, every time we enter the land of complex systems, where the human hand is decisive, and cannot be guided solely by the automatic nature of a procedure.

Are you familiar with the relationship between citizens and public administration? When, for example, we need documents that never arrive or are promptly delayed? When there's always a missing signature, a rule to apply, a paragraph to evaluate? At that point, we end up trapped by the procedure. The bureaucrat on duty washes his hands , like Pontius Pilate, assumes no responsibility , distances himself from us, the citizens who have a right to his service, and raises a " no possumus " sign. Procedure prevents this. There is no corner of public administration, and in general of the bureaucratic apparatus, which is the backbone of the State, that isn't tainted by a distorted and wasteful use of this word. Procedure.

EXCESS BUREAUCRACY IN HOSPITALS

We experience the same thing, with the same violence, when, as citizens, we change our clothes and put on those of consumers . Try listening to tape recordings of a train or a plane during an unbearable delay. You'll hear, like arrows, a sequence of stereotyped sentences, all mingled with the procedural requirements. Without any distinction. Among the delays: a quarter of an hour is one thing, two hours is another. Among the people who suffer them: the journey of a young person leaving for vacation is not the same as that of an elderly person moving from one city to another for medical treatment. Among the modalities: being stuck in a tunnel is not the same as parking on a train station platform.

The procedure reaches its apotheosis when combined with voice messages . When (stupid) automation is associated, thanks to technology, with any (intelligent) invention. The bill increases with each procedure. A smartphone replacement must be ordered following a certain procedure. And under the title of this word, with a barrage of toll-free numbers, always subject to charges, messages, and various offers, we end up in a veritable centrifuge. Where we are helpless before the avalanche of messages conveyed by the procedure, by a shadow that doesn't even resemble a human.

The procedure assembles and unifies everything, in a useless and disarming response. Humans, with their reason and understanding , are capable, without violating any norm, of providing tailored responses , always respecting the uniqueness of the person and their expectations. If they don't, they're afraid. Or they don't want to take on responsibility.

WHEN FOLLOWING THE PROCEDURE IS A MISTAKE

We've often denounced the lack of doctors on Don't Waste , telling the story of surgeons returning to the operating room after reaching the age of 80, in a healthcare system at risk of collapse. There's a disconnect between training and the operating rooms, certainly. But there's something else that many doctors have explained to us, sharing their personal experiences: this profession has changed profoundly, it's no longer as exciting as it once was, and it's overwhelmed by bureaucratic requirements that insist on respecting only one thing: the procedure. The patient's health comes second, much second. You can well understand that, under these conditions, a doctor, like a university professor or an elementary school teacher, becomes an extra on the grand stage of those services we receive under the strict constraint of obsessive compliance with procedures.

And here we come to the word that the procedure should proclaim as its flagship, according to the definition we saw from Treccani: the result. The rigor of a mechanism, a chain of behaviors, have no meaning if they are evaluated independently of the mechanism's final effect. Thus, they are merely abstract things. Dangerously counterproductive . When you apply a procedure, if you don't want to be crushed by it and drag your interlocutor down with it, always remember that its existence has meaning if it contributes to achieving what it was designed to achieve. The expected result, precisely, and not its failure in the darkness of even a lack of common sense.

WHEN HEALTHCARE HORRIFIES US:

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