Therapy for Ailing Procedures

Abstract

WE HAVE FOUND A NEW way to write procedures that really. works. People read them easily, understand them readily, and so really use them-to the benefit of the care given to our patients. Our success story got its start one day when our hospital administrator brought a book to the nursing office. It was called The Playscript Procedure; A New Tool of Administration, and she felt it might help in the work we were doing on both new and old procedures. She was right. Now all our departmental and one-man procedures conform to the ideas of Leslie H. Matthies, the author of Playscript Procedure. Our procedures all began with statements of purpose, followed by lists of necessary equipment and general information which could not be incorporated into the actual stepby-step, or how-to-proceed, part. They were packed with the kind of words Mr. Matthies called foreign and which he stressed were not only unnecessary, but which made procedures weaker and less useful tools. A search through the manuals of half a dozen other hospitals showed they looked just like ours. Information was often hard or impossible to find, and steps in a work sequence tended to be obscured by the maze of general material that should be taken for granted by those expected to use the procedure.