The Dear Jean diaries on grime and gradoo

BB writes to her old friend Jean about gunk in computer keyboards and the potential perils of healthcare IT.

Dear Jean

As you know, I love a good spring clean. Even better, a good summer clean. And it suddenly occurred to me last week: now there are so many computers around, whose job is it to clean them??

I haven’t seen a single IT person in all the months that I’ve been back on the wards, and when I took a look at one of our computer keyboards last week… well, only one expression came to mind: “totally gross”.

When I turned it over and gave it a good shake, I decided that it must contain the remains of several people’s lunches (mostly breadcrumbs and various bits of shrivelled, desiccated vegetation... well, I hope that green stuff was vegetation...) But the bulk of this miniature food mountain were crumbs from the afternoon biscuit ritual, topped off with what looked suspiciously like the fallout from a jam doughnut. Nurses are SO messy!

An old friend of mine is from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. They have a great word for this kind of detritus over there. They call it ‘gradoo’ (pronounced graw-doo). This describes anything and everything that is cruddy, scurfy, messy, streaky, dusty, sticky, or left-over (sounds a bit like the alternative seven dwarves).

One of my favourite definitions of this word - which I found on Urbandictionary.com - is as follows: Gradoo: ‘Unidentified grime in crevices or cracks.’ Mmm, that leaves a lot to the imagination. Let’s hope there wasn’t anything too bad in that keyboard I cleaned out. 

Meanwhile, you’ll recall that my colleague Gillian is planning to continue with her weight loss regime by running a marathon. She’s doing well with her diet and training; although I must say it’s making her much grumpier.

I think she’s only wearing the pedometer I bought her for her birthday so she can moan about how many miles she’s doing in a day. I went out for a run with her recently. Well, I say ‘run’, but it was more of a slothful jog. All because of me! I hadn’t realised how unfit I’d become over the last few years.

Tearing around on the wards is only partial exercise for your body and I’ve realised I need to do something more all-encompassing. That’s a tough one when my feet are already begging for mercy at the end of each day! I think I’d better have a little browse through the Amazon website and see if I can get a couple of cheap work-out videos to get me back into the swing of things.

Talking of health…I saw something really cool on telly the other day. A doctor was talking about how he could monitor his patient remotely via an iPhone, and you could see all the vital signs displayed on his screen.

Apparently, the new operating system includes specifications that allow medical device makers to pair their devices with the iPhone via Bluetooth. It’s incredible technology, but it also raises a couple of questions.

I suppose the immediate one that springs to mind is how do you verify the patient correctly when you’re dealing with them using a remote device? Many strange things can occur in cyberspace, and scrambled data aside, you might simply have any number of patients called ‘Paula Jones’ in your hospital.

I guess you’d have to try and adhere to the same rigorous checks as are followed on the wards: patient name, hospital number, date of birth…and perhaps some sort of electronic barcode transmission which could be sent via Bluetooth?

So let’s see, you’ve got the possibility of the wrong diagnosis for the wrong patient, scrambled or partially missing data… or that good old fashioned IT problem, a slow link! Oh dear, it sounds like I’m being terribly negative doesn’t it? Believe me, I love new technology and I’ve seen what fantastic things they’re doing in places like theatres…however, like everyone else, I just want to make sure it’s fully tested before they try it out on me (ha ha).

Talking of theatres, I’ve got another session there coming up soon…plus an exciting (not) Study Skills Day at the University, in preparation for my rapidly approaching return to practice course. Eek!

Laters
BB x