I have served on many health care committees , and I must say this has been an extremely depressing experience . These committees are now proliferating left right and centre during this Coronavirus crisis, because everyone wants to grab a slice of the pie !
Bureaucrats, Ministers, and Corporates set these up to show how important they are , and how they are contributing to fighting this “deadly” virus.
Sadly, most these meetings are extremely unproductive .
Everyone is focused on being politically correct , and no one wants to rock the boat. The rule is – the HIPPO ( Highest paid person ) rules !
The truth is that all the decisions are made before the committee meetings by the powers-that-be, and these meeting are usually reduced to formalities in order to rubber stamp decisions made by the key players. And if you don’t know who the key players are, that clearly means you aren’t one of them !
They want to join lots of committees, and create partnerships with others, so they can expand their circle of influence .
They are hungry for publicity , which is why they want to constantly start new projects all the time, because this gives them the opportunity to send out press releases ! They don’t really care about what happens to the projects they begin , and many are buried quietly without accomplishing anything meaningful.
Rather than try to help the end user, they are more interested in achieving vanity metrics – quantity over quality !
The members on the committee are usually the same tired old faces , because this is an old boy’s circle .
Their solutions for all problems is simplistic – collect information , create databases; and publish guidelines . Their solutions are impersonal because they don’t have clinicians in active practice on them – they are too busy taking care of their patients in real life. Most of their recommendations are of little use to the practising doctor , because they don’t usually have anyone who is at the cutting edge of actually providing clinical care. Most of these committees consist of hospital administrators technologists and MBAs who are only interested in the Big Picture.
They pack their committee with high profile names, who scratch each other’s backs, and are usually either figureheads, or have a hidden agenda.
While the junior members are quite hard working because they are intelligent, the productive output is very little . Even if they do come up with solutions, this often gets lost between the cracks, as they try to coordinate with the committees of other organisations ! Red tape multiplies more rapidly than the virus !
And as you can imagine, I don’t get invited to the next meeting of many of these committees !
What’s your experience been ?
Most ‘such’ committees rely on irrelevant databases, media reports, mismanaged personnel and ‘Whats in it for me’ attitude!!!