God Lost His Reputation
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God Lost His Reputation
Once upon a recent time, at the turn of the century, a nationally reputed cardiac surgeon was appointed to conduct a complex surgery, on a young girl, at a well-established hospital in Western India. The surgeon was revered as God to humanity.
The best support team from a chain of hospitals had been selected owing to the risk factors that were inherent in this particular case. Each team member brought unblemished experience to the surgery. They had, in the past, worked together in various combinations.
The patient was dressed for the surgery in her room and transported to the operation theatre at 7:00 a.m.
Outside the theatre, a distance away, basic seating had been provided for two family members per patient being operated on. Three surgeries were in progress. Family members, with stress lines crafted
on their faces, silently read from small religious books. The silence was deafening.
The theatre doors had been shut for 70 minutes.
Suddenly there was a power outage! The standby generators failed to trigger in the seven-second norm.
The patient died.
God lost his reputation.
Lessons Learned
- Support services should also be included in risk assessments
- Effectiveness is a function of interdependent variables
- Efficiency of equipment should be measured regularly
- When human life is at stake, reliability engineering should be mandated
- Possibility of sudden death of an established reputation, even though the root cause lies elsewhere
- Negative perceptions can be born with just one episode.
- Negative perceptions can erode even a robust reputation.
