So. what happened to our new managers plan to integrate the several secondary care Mental Health Services and so mitigate the waste friction that undermined the efficient function of them all, separately and as a whole.
Remember too, that is real-life scenario brought to one of our workshops by an attendee.
Well. without going into details over time the whole project broke down and after a period of joint-usage of the kitchen the different teams slipped back to their old pattern and only used the kitchen to store food, coffee and..............milk!
Staff wanted their own milk, for various dietary etc reasons but also they became annoyed (angry) when there was no milk....it had gone off....others hadn't paid for the milk etc and with this as the central gripe gain, slipped back to their old ways.
The teams, once again were split and the inefficiencies that this engendered crept back in and the Primary Task of the teams - to efficiently care and treat the patients that the whole service assigned to them, was undermined.
Milk can of course have many connotations and in a psychodynamic model one could, as it were and justifiably, go to town on that but this model will not find much gain in overdoing the meaning of milk though one might of course, hold that in mind.
So, why would a team (organisation, system, institution) sabotage an attempt to increase efficiency, the success of its Primary Task, the enjoyment of its team members etc etc? Surely, this is counter-intuitive - people enter a profession such as psychiatric nursing, social work, psychiatry etc in order to have a positive role in teams which are dedicated to improving the lives of the patients and....make no mistake (as it were) - they do!
So why do they collude in sabotaging that process and instead come to work feeling cross (angry) with others, with their managers, with their subordinates and with patients and their families?
Well, the above scenario took place maybe in the 1990s but to look at this in more detail, we will go back even further to the 1950s, to the Cassel Hospital near Richmond on Thames i.e. outer London and to the work of another founder of this model i.e., Tom Main.
Comentários