Archive for July, 2008

Mac/Gcal/BlackBerry scheduling nirvana

July 29, 2008 at 1:52 pm · Filed under BlackBerry, Mac ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

Despite all my free time of late, I’ve engaged in surprisingly little geekery. I just haven’t felt inspired. However, Google made a small change recently that I think will make a giant difference in the world of Mac scheduling, so I feel compelled to spread the word.

Google Calendar has a bunch of fab features (I lust for the natural language support if I’m using iCal), but you can’t use it offline, so I’ve ping-ponged back and forth between it and iCal for a while. I’ve spent money on tools like Busy Sync that are worthless because they work only MOST of the time, and MOST of the time isn’t on if you need to know where you’re supposed to be ALL of the time. But lo! Google has introduced CalDav support. In a nutshell, this means two-way syncing between Google Calendar and iCal. It has some holes in it, and they could be deal-breakers if you need those features, but happily for me I don’t really care about any of them.

You have to poke around in settings files a bit, but it took me less than 5 minutes to get everything up and running, including testing the two-way sync part. I threw some complicated repeating events at it, and even those went over well.

It dawned on me: this is wicked cool. It’s cool even if you just have a Mac and want to use Google calendar, but if you meet those conditions AND have a BlackBerry, keep reading…

I have a BlackBerry and a Mac, which has the potential for causing loads of problems with syncing, but I’ve headed them off by using Google Sync over the air and not messing with wired syncs. So far it hasn’t missed a beat, unlike when I used Pocket Mac or Missing Sync, which puked up duplicate events and other annoyances onto my BlackBerry from iCal. If I make a change on either Google Calendar or my BlackBerry, it is shortly the same in both places (not true push, but “shortly”).

Therefore, I can now use iCal or Google Calendar or my BlackBerry to schedule something, and it will shortly be the same in all three places: sans wires or manual syncing. Dead brilliant! It sounds kludgy, but it’s not that difficult to set up and requires no maintenance. It might take an hour or two at most for loads of saved time and hassle in the future. Here’s how to do it. It assumes you have only one iCal calendar, but you can interpolate for more. Do the steps in this order, or you’ll end up tearing your hair out. Trust me on this one.

  1. If you are using iCal, export the iCal file to your desktop. Wipe your Google Calendar clean and import the iCal file into it. This makes Google Calendar your master calendar. Delete the iCal calendar from iCal (you’ve got a backup now; save it!).
  2. If your BlackBerry already has calendar events on it, you have to delete them. You have to use Windoze so you can have the Desktop Manager software. I ran mine with VMWare Fusion, but if you have to borrow a Windoze machine for a half hour, it’s probably worth it. Start the Desktop Manager software, connect your BlackBerry, go to Backup/Restore –> Advanced, highlight Calendar, and click Clear. Now you have a clean BlackBerry calendar and a clean iCal calendar and all your stuff is in Google Calendar.
  3. Now download Google Sync onto your BlackBerry. Fire it up and feed it the appropriate login info. After it syncs the first time you can choose which calendars you want synced. You can choose how often it syncs (“Automatic” works great for me) and how far into the future to have events synced. Now you can just hide that icon and sit back; changes made on Google Calendar or your BlackBerry will now be automatically reconciled. Good times.
  4. If you also want to be able to use iCal, follow Google’s instructions for setting up CalDAV with iCal. It has instructions for setting up multiple calendars. Now lean back and schedule away, any way you want. No wires, no fuss.

Just to sweeten the deal, download the Google Calendar dashboard widget for a clutter-free agenda view. And while you’re putting cool productivity tools in your dashboard, grab Remember the Moof, which brings your Remember the Milk tasks to the dashboard. And did I mention that you can wirelessly and automatically also sync tasks between your Mac and BlackBerry with MilkSync for BlackBerry (costs $25 per year…about $2 per month for task-tending bliss)?

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Joint Commission: disruptive behavior is bad. Very bad.

July 14, 2008 at 1:30 pm · Filed under Health care, Nursing ·Tagged , , , , ,

The Joint Commission has released a sentinel event alert, Behaviors that undermine a culture of safety, that addresses issues near and dear to my heart, as regular readers will know. Effective January 2009, the Joint Commission has added two leadership initiatives that address “disruptive and inappropriate behavior.” Why? It leads to sentinel events (a sentinel event is “an unexpected occurrence involving death or serious physical or psychological injury, or the risk thereof”)! Not only does disruptive behavior ultimately expose health care institutions to lawsuits—

“Studies link patient complaints about unprofessional, disruptive behaviors and malpractice risk.”

but it also increases costs and decreases staff retention (relevant because, if you haven’t heard, there’s a nursing shortage):

“Intimidating and disruptive behaviors can foster medical errors, contribute to poor patient satisfaction and to preventable adverse outcomes, increase the cost of care, and cause qualified clinicians, administrators and managers to seek new positions in more professional environments.”

Basically, The Joint Commission is adding to our duties as health care providers to grow backbones and address bad behavior like adults instead of bitching about it to people who can’t do anything about it. They’re guilting us into it by reminding us that we really are all grownups and that patient safety and outcomes are at stake—as well they should!

It is interesting that bickering and back-stabbing in hospitals have reached a level critical enough to invite Joint Commission initiatives. My unit at work is emphasizing this lately, and oh boy does it need to. Our nursing director has even instituted a hand signal (a “talk to the hand” kind of dealio) that we should use when someone is gossiping or behaving inappropriately. We had a mandatory staff meeting on acting like adults.

Let us remember that it’s not just our egos and our comfort in the workplace at stake when folks aren’t getting along; miscommunication or noncommunication as a result of fear, anger, or simple pique could cause our next error that leads to patient harm. Yikes.

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I’ll get you, my pretty!

July 4, 2008 at 3:29 pm · Filed under Health care, Nursing ·Tagged

This post is a follow-up to my previous post Witch Hunts in the Hospital. This morning I listened to an audio program from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Open School for Health Professions; it is called “What is it like to be trapped in an error?” and you can download the audio or a transcript here. The IHI’s ideas are new to me (admit mistakes? encourage openness about mistakes? mistakes are GOING to happen? medical errors involve TWO victims—the patient and the provider?) and extremely eye opening. The entire thing rang true to me and lit a fire under me to wave the banner of stopping hospital witch hunts.

Currently, I rarely learn from other folks’ mistakes because everything is hushed up. No one learns from mine because as soon as the error is discovered it is hushed up. I’ve committed only one BAD error, but I don’t even have my license yet. I live in constant dread of the next one. I felt a little vindicated to hear the program mentioned above, because it emphasizes the systemic and human-related aspects of errors. I had no idea that there was actually a science of investigating and preventing health care errors. It is helpful to feel that a framework exists to help combat that constant fear of making a bad mistake.

In addition, I was gloomily happy to hear that other people, too, are horrified by their errors. The other people involved in “my” error appeared to blow it off, and outsiders who got the HIPAA-fied version of the story unilaterally said, “Learn from it and move on.” I was really upset: when I got home from work that day, I sat under a hot shower and cried for a long time, and after that I went to bed feeling that I was unsafe as a patient-care provider and had made a horrible choice for a career. I felt like a freak for being that upset when no one else appeared to be. However, the folks in this audio discussion admitted that they were also very upset when they made bad mistakes (the nurse says she felt like she was going to throw up), and this helps.

It would be so much easier to navigate errors and use them to improve patient care if we could somehow promote openness, remove punitive witch hunts and gossip, and be honest with each other. My one incident occurred a while back, and still no one has asked me a single question about what happened. I even went to my boss recently to volunteer the information because there are elements about it that could be easily used to prevent a repeat, and she didn’t want to discuss it. It’s just weird.

Anyone have any comments on this? Is this a top-down or bottom-up change? How can we start? What can one nurse do? Redoubling our efforts is good but ultimately leads to exhaustion. I don’t think it’s enough.

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