Held up by systems

Patient consultations are at least 2 minutes longer per patient and the interactions less ideal because the system used to load medical records for the doctors are slow. The doctor tries to engage the patient but keeps glancing at the cursor to check if the records have loaded.

The website is down today so the electronic forms you were supposed to submit today cannot be filled in. You’ll have to wait till tomorrow and you’d be considered later in submission.

This form only has boxes for filling in Chinese characters for one’s name; so if you have an English name, you’ll have to try writing all the words within that small space and hope they accept the form.

You need to get the job experience, and put it on your CV so that the ones recruiting will select your CV while screening them. But how do you get the job experience in the first place then?

There are lots of systems put in place to improve lives, speed up processing, make things more ‘predictable’. In reality, they often are about trying to standardise, ignore idiosyncrasies, and reduce problem solving to ‘processing’. If you were brought up to think that life is about standing in line, obeying the commands to get your bowl of soup, then it can be hard to start being creative and seeing reality for what it is about rather than just what the systems are about.

For those working out the systems, ask ‘who is this for?’ It can’t be for everyone because if the system tries to serve everyone, it serves no one.