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Mac’s Safety Space: Cylindrical musings and nudging as a compliance strategy

Hospital Safety Insider, March 8, 2018

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Editor's note: This originally appeared on HCPro's Mac's Safety Space blog.

Howdy, folks. After surviving the battering of this past weekend’s tumultuous weather in the Northeast (I got to experience it twice — once in Indiana and again back home), I’m going to be (relatively) brief for this week’s missive.

First up, hopefully most of you are familiar with the TED Talks concept (all the info you need about that you can find here) and NPR has a weekly program that kind of crystallizes some of the TED offerings in their TED Radio Hour. This past weekend (no TV, so we had to huddle around the radio, just like in olden times), the program revolved around the use of gentle pushes or nudges to change behaviors (you can hear that broadcast here). As safety professionals, I think we are all acquainted with the various attempts to get folks to do our bidding when it comes to safe practice (that sounds a little authoritarian, but it’s kinda what we’re up against) and I thought the entire program really gave me some food for thought in how we might come at compliance from a slightly different perspective. I thought some of the ideas were fascinating and definitely worth sharing, so if you have a spare 55 minutes or so (the webpage above does break it out into the individual sections of the broadcast — I think it’s all good, but whatever description seems most interesting to you would be a good starting point), you might give it a whirl...

I also want to bring you some hopeful news on the cylinder storage segregation front; when this whole focus started, quite a few folks were cited for storing non-full (empty or partial) cylinders in the same location as full cylinders. I don’t know when The Joint Commission posted the updated FAQ on cylinder storage, but, and I quote, “Full and partially full cylinders are permitted to be stored together, unless the organization’s policy requires further segregation.” I know this whole thing was the bane of a lot of folks’ existence, particularly after we had to work so diligently to get folks to secure the cylinders properly, only to have this little paradigm shift towards the edge of darkness. I believe that this will make things somewhat simpler in the execution (make sure your policy reflects the allowance for full and partials to be stored together — they’ll be looking to review that policy).

As a final, non-safety note, I just flew cross-country and was able to watch Gary Oldman’s performance as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour. I’ve always been something of a history buff, with World War II as a central theme and must tell you that I thought it was a really great performance and a fine movie (or is it a film?). It really points out the power of consensus and the use of the spoken word to galvanize folks (which kind of ties back to the nudging — though Sir Winston’s nudge packed a lot of wallop). At any rate, I thought it was very well done (no surprise about the Best Actor Oscar) and probably my favorite since Lincoln (the movie, not the car or President, though Lincoln in the Bardo was a very interesting book...).

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