In a recent New Yorker article entitled “The Engineer’s Lament”, Malcolm Gladwell wrote about the issues sometimes faced by engineers. In the article, he says:
“There is an old joke about an engineer, a priest, and a doctor enjoying a round of golf. Ahead of them is a group playing so slowly and inexpertly that in frustration the three ask the greenkeeper for an explanation. “That’s a group of blind firefighters,” they are told. “They lost their sight saving our clubhouse last year, so we let them play for free.”
The priest says, “I will say a prayer for them tonight.”
The doctor says, “Let me ask my ophthalmologist colleagues if anything can be done for them.”
And the engineer says, “Why can’t they play at night?”
This story provides a good example of how we expect engineers to think. While the priest offers empathy for the firefighters and the doctor offers care, the engineer tries to solve a problem. While some may accuse the engineer of lacking compassion for the firefighters, he is doing what engineers are trained to do; analyze the situation and regardless of any emotional circumstances, find a solution or make a recommendation based on solid data, logic, and good science.
A hospital environment can sometimes be a very difficult place for engineers to make objective decisions, especially when others around them are acting illogically or purely from emotion. I can recall the time when television news shows and the press were reporting on the dangers of cell phones interfering with medical devices. Our administrators and others who had seen television news or read press reports were pressuring us to ban visitors from using these phones everywhere in our hospital. Data, however, indicated that very few visitors ever got close enough to life sustaining equipment for their phones to interfere with its operation and it would be much more logical to ban cell phone use in our intensive care units only. It would have been easy for us to climb on the emotional bandwagon and agree to a hospital wide ban, but we stuck by the data and made the unpopular decision not to agree to a ban. We do things like that, because society relies on us to make decisions based on data and science and not on the basis of what is reported in the nightly news.
Sometimes our decisions require that we suppress our personal biases. When we are evaluating equipment, we might not like a particular salesperson or manufacturer, or we might be upset because someone made a purchasing decision without consulting us. Despite the temptation to let these biases influence us, we need to do what we are trained to do and perform an objective evaluation based solely on the merits of the equipment and its performance.
Beyond our technical skills, our professional reputations and our personal integrity are the most important things that we can bring to the healthcare delivery process. Although this sometimes requires us to make unpopular decisions and occasionally suppress our personal biases, this is what society expects of us.
