Gary's views

Gary's weekly views

Each week an article by Gary has appeared in the Plympton Plymstock and Ivybridge News in South West Devon. The articles are published here

Risk Averse

Public information broadcast 2005:
“Don’t go out today, you might trip over and hurt yourself. Certainly do not get in your car, given that over 3,000 of us die on the roads every year. Think twice about turning on your gas cooker or changing a light bulb. Do not let your children out to play without three inches (sorry 558 millimetres) of cotton wool bandaging and under no circumstances let them go on a school trip. If you are a doctor or teacher social worker or police officer do not exercise your own professional judgement and in every case refer all decisions to a third party panel of independent experts. To be on the safe side, stay indoors, make no decisions and don’t do anything.”

Sheer fantasy, or the natural progression of the way our society is developing?

Risk averse - that is the posh name for being scared of making a decision, exercising discretion or judgement or taking a chance. Are you noticing more and more examples of this affliction spreading? So general practitioners of many years experience feel under pressure to refer patients to the hospital for a second opinion, clogging up the waiting lists, when they know full well what the diagnosis is. So school trips are cancelled because the insurance companies wring their hands about whether the staff pupil ratios are adequate. So rather than on-the-spot common sense dispensation of justice, voluminous police reports are written and time is taken to go through the “proper procedures”.

What is going on out there?

More and more professionals are reluctant to make the decisions that they are trained to make because they are terrified of making a mistake and paying for it heavily either in the law courts or through the unpleasant modern version of witch ducking – trial by frenzied media. On top of that more and more regulation, poking its stifling nose into every nook and cranny of our lives chokes discretion and local flexibility. Everything is done by the book, referred up to the next level, considered by committee or cancelled all together.
Does this make us any safer or better run? No, because the most effective layer of decision-making is the one closest to the coalface where a real assessment of the problem in hand, and the individual concerned, can be made. Somehow we must find a way to give the freedom back to professionals to exercise their judgement without forever glancing over their shoulders.

posted by Nigel on Monday, April 05, 2004