Hospitals gotta be accredited, right? For accountability of thier practices and actions. And of course, politics never come into play, nor any sort of underhanded threats of any kind. Of course not. The one guaranteed outcome, is that the whole accreditation process will generate 240 hours of Managerial hand-wringing, mountains of paperwork, and everybody stands up straight and smiles for the 3 days the JCAHO inspectors show up. Of course after that, there are more forms to till out on an hourly basis.

Bullshit Tolerance Level

In days long gone
I had the capacity
For tolerating crap,
No matter what they threw at me
I was an accommodating chap,
I could outrun all the sputum bombs
And sidestep charcoal stool,
I really grooved on gaping wounds
And thought bullet holes were cool.

I could face the psycho-social issues
Of all our crazy clients,
And mesmerize the public
With my grasp of quantum science,
But now that I am entering
The fifth decade of living,
My bullshit tolerance level
Is no longer so forgiving.

If you’re the hired gun
Of some drug related war,
I’ll let your rivals know your whereabouts
So they can even up the score,
Or perhaps you perpetrated
Some child abuse infraction,
I don’t care if you develop
A life threatening impaction.

But the things that irk me most, I’d say
Are the paperwork inventions,
Designed by anal retentive types
With over zealous intentions,
Couched in terms of simplification
For all our charting needs,
Or for insurance documentation
Of our techno-medico deeds.

The Joint Commission complicates
The state of healthcare today,
“We’ll withhold your accreditation”
Unless you do things our way,
It’s not about cost containment
Or the quality of life we pursue,
It’s the typical bureaucrat bullshit
To control everything that we do.

And this attitude clearly pervades
From the top to the bottom of the pile,
Anal retentive and educated
They administrate, with a smile,
So caught up in the burdensome bullshit
And removed from the care of the sick,
They promise us simplification
As the mountain of papers grow thick.

Well, that just about wraps my position
Where I stand on the pile, right now,
I feel like an ant, on an ant hill
Located behind a large cow,
And my bullshit tolerance level
Has reached a saturation state,
What I need is a giant umbrella
To endure the rest of my fate!

Fibril_late; 5/94