We are often asked to use plain English in our writing . I maintain that the English language is too beautiful to be anything like plain or common. However, I came across this little gem of circumlocution from the NHS :Tayside Board has asked its Executive team
"to develop a dashboard approach to performance reporting and assurance. It is increasingly recognised that high quality information presented through a dashboard approach is a key driver in promoting a performance and improvement culture within organisations by providing a balanced and intuitive view of improvement and performance".
Can you dear Reader better that as an instance of pure gibberish in the NHS?
All offerings welcome.
Written by
Cateran
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Quite, Don. At best I reckon that it has some connection with a car and by extension an abridgement device like a lozenge bracket for either an arrow or a word. Then again, as Sassy says, why bother if the author(s) probably do not understand what they are writing!? Maybe in this Wordy Wonderland "key driver" is the phrase we might home in on to establish a crazy continuity of comprehension. Thanks for your reply.
This is a Department of Health initiative to boost access to GP practices. There is a total dissonance between this bland, meaningless, title; one which would be better applied to a sporting or charity event, and its far more substantive aim ie a significant shift in in primary care resources.
And how did primary care respond to this meaningless invitation? Well, take your pick from the following efforts sent in by potential ' provider stakeholders':
"Better Access, Better Care, Better Lives" (Barking & Dagenham and Havering & Redbridge),
"Moving Primary Care to a Wellbeing Approach" (West Wakefield),
"Together as One Community" (Hambleton, Richmondshire, Whitby),
And my favourites,
"Transformational Innovations for Primary Care in West Hertfordshire" (Watford),
"Transforming the Access Experience at Scale across England" (The Care UK Super practice).
Believe me when I say that GPs have not got the literary gift to come up with these gems. Somewhere along the line some outside, expensive consultancy has been brought in to professionalise a bid for extra resources. Their contribution? The title for the bid document!
This nonsense is only a continuation of years of rebranding within the NHS, from the top down and which includes the latest reincarnation of the admittedly now snappy, "NHS England".
Hospital titles have cascaded through the basic and adequately descriptive "hospital" to "general hospital" to "district general hospital" to "NHS hospital" to "NHS hospital trust" to our now, and by no means unique, local effort: 'TheCxxx Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust '(I think I've got that in the right order). Why bother? Who are we doing this for? Certainly not the public who, at best, are bemused by these ever lengthening sign boards outside our hospitals and at worst, irritated with paying for our ever changing stationary bills.
We GPs need to get away from the sentiment that we can only gain credibility in the public sector by emulating pointless competitive practices in the private. We need to get away from business seminars run by teenagers in sharp suits who think that they need to buy, and bill YOU for, a new Rolex, every time you ask for the time. The NHS spent, conservatively, £40 million in six months in 2013 on management consultants. That sum can buy you an awful lot of nonsense.
Do we really think that this Scrabble board jumble of words imbues us with some kind of validity and gravitas? I don't think the public see it that way. In truth I don't think they care what we are called as long as we provide an effective healthcare service. I do however worry that our verbal diarrhoea might give them the impression that we either have so much redundant time that we can waste it on irrelevant fripperies or that we genuinely believe in that old cliché about the deckchairs on the Titanic.
Instead of stringing together words and ending up sounding like some inbred minor gentry in Debrett's, maybe we should just focus on being "doctors" and leave the silly names to those with more experience in that field; such as pop groups favoured by politicians?
Sorry i nicked this off the internet but a good example of the rubbish being produced by management consultants at great expense to the NHS.
This is brilliant, skischool. It wonderfully encapsulates the sales-speak used by thrusting entrepreneurs who are set on selling a product. The GP author of your extract is on the money when it comes to castigating the fracturing and abuse of linguistic commonsense, so much so that hospitals are becoming houses of horrors for patients and their families attempting to navigate their way to wards, trying to make sense of the total walls of signage that simply complicate the journey , especially of visitors through the vastness of corridors and maze of glass that showcase our modern hospitals.
And I haven't spoken yet about the spawn of NHS gibberish, namely the acronym. Everywhere we go we are confronted with ICU, ECD, NMD, CAT, LTD, MDT,MRI....
Nicked or not it's very good Skis. Makes a good sensible read. I wish those with the power to scrap all the gibberish would read and comply where appropriate. 😬
Correction. Many organisations create panels of data which they chose to call dashboards, which are in fact spreadsheets, data panels or something else, but certainly not dashboards. 😁
Sensible observation deejames but what is for patient consumption in all of this managerial speak in the NHS? It feels like a secret language written to keep access hidden, much like the medical profession as a whole, not to forget the pharmaceutical industry with its compound nouns to label a product, mostly unpronounceable or polysyllabic where the average Joe doesn't know which syllable to stress . when medicine is a tongue twister Try CLOPIDOGREL or ATORVASTATIN. Try swallowing those semantic pills.
we had an e mail to all healthcare professionals at our hospital recently instructing us to use simplex language and not to use abbreviations. It took six of us to decipher this e mail!
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