Frectally speaking

As my journey from the clinical world into management and information technology has unfolded over time , I have had my ups and downs, haven’t we all…

It is widely understood that we all can and should learn from failures as well as successes and at this year Irish Association of Emergency Medicine conference I chose the chance to focus on the former, my failures, for a helpful change..

Yes I could have talked about the successes I have had, of which I am very proud, but I think its just as / if not more interesting/helpful to others to be open and talk about failures.

Often in the healthcare world, with its conservative and risk averse culture, people are discouraged from discussing things that can/have gone wrong. My own instinct is to be very honest about all the many complexities of a domain like healthcare and openly tell people that in a complex system that people and processes inevitably fail sometimes and that we could/should learn from that..

So over the course of a brief but I hope helpful presentation I explored a personal journey through medicine, emergency medicine, healthcare, complexity, health IT markets.. trying to change the world of healthcare & the health IT market…and finding myself failing (in part) against economic and political forces of our time etc etc..

None the less I finished on an optimistic note, citing a fellow Irishman;

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” (Beckett)

As I find a picture tells a thousand words, hope some of these slides speak for themselves..