Feedback

The idea that human decision and performance can be improved by feedback is never new, but has probably been forgotten.

The word feedback has hardly found a place in the field of corporate finance. When someone decides to buy a stock - or even an entire company - it may not be obvious for years that the move turned out to be a mistake. By then, those responsible for the mistake have often moved on to other places.

"True," you say. "But unless I move from being a doctor to the field of finance, what does this have to do with me?" Lots, I hope.

Doctors are no different. We need to be told when we're wrong, and not only when we're right. Depressing as it is to utter the word wrong, I do believe that we have to be told how many times we made mistakes in cleansing the skin before jabbing a needle into the patient for blood culture. Or, how many times we made the wrong decision to (or not to) admit a patient to the medical ward.

For now, I don't have to rush pitter-patter through each and every new case at the emergency room, the way the police would be doing at the road block. To a busy doctor, the job can be a downright classic example of acting on instinct. It ought to fail and it usually does. All too often we send away patients with serious ailments unbeknownst to ourselves. In the binary shorthand doctors use to conceptualize patients, we either admit the patients to the hospital or send them home - a tidy distinction that, unfortunately, crumbles in real life. If an emergency room doctor was to learn anything it was the feedback of his decision.