When it comes to time, people in power believe they have more of it at their disposal than others.
But positions of authority give people a sense they are better able to control time than subordinates, even though both groups are equally at the mercy of the clock. In an era of day planners, deadlines and billable hours, there are far more clocks than people.
Business executives, policy makers, healthcare insurers and hospital administrators, engineers and others in power are far more likely to underestimate the time required to complete work, ignoring past experience, according to four recent behavioral experiments by researchers at the University of Kent at Canterbury, in the U.K.
Social psychology studies have shown this illusion of executive control can be so strong that it can lead those in authority to believe they can command events that are beyond anyone's direct control.
Better Care at Your Bedside Demands More Face Time
Hospitals are freeing up nurses to do the one thing they often don't have enough time for: taking care of patients.
Swamped with tasks such as hunting for supplies, tracking down medications, filling out paperwork at the nursing station and looking for missing test results, nurses may spend less than two hours of a 12-hour shift in direct patient care, studies show. But research has also found that the more time nurses spend at the bedside, the less likely patients are to suffer falls, infections and medication errors, and the more likely they will be satisfied with their care.
Now hospitals are changing traditional work practices, shifting more routine tasks to certified nurse assistants and other less highly skilled staffers. They are eliminating inefficient processes that make nurses walk as many as 5 miles around the hospital in a single shift. Some hospitals are aiming to triple the amount of time nurses spend with patients.
The aim is to let nurses and other health specialists spend more time both caring for patients and educating them and their families on follow-up care once they leave the hospital. An aging population means sicker patients with more complex needs, yet hospital stays are much shorter than in the past. Patients get discharged sooner with more complicated follow-up care, and hospitals face financial penalties for readmitting patients soon after discharge.
"We shouldn't be using expensive professional nursing time doing unnecessary and inefficient things when that time could be reinvested in direct patient care," says Patricia Rutherford, a nurse and vice president at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. The same goes for other health care specialists, such as physical therapists and other after surgery specialists.
Source: The Wall Street Journal, July 22, 2014
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