
Hospitals have developed something of a reputation for being rife with bad processes. When processes are not adequate, the result is an abundance of workarounds: nurses looking for missing equipment, staff bending the official procedure to keep care moving, and teams fixing the immediate symptom without fixing the system that created it.
One AHRQ PSNet perspective reports that nurses spent 33 minutes of a 7.5-hour shift on workarounds outside their job description. That kind of firefighting may keep the shift moving, but it does not remove the root cause.








