4 ms·

Excel recruitment time bomb makes top trainee doctors 'unappointable'

51 points by jjgreen 3y ago

alpaca128 3y ago
> Each of the seven [UK] recruitment regions creates a separate spreadsheet, but these have no standardised template, naming convention or structure. After being manually amended, all of the various scores are entered into a Master spreadsheet. This is carried out row-by-row and takes several days, likely to be subject to interruptions > In the process, a ranking column [..] had been wrongly transferred [..], erroneously appearing as an interview score. After their interviews, candidates were ranked 1 to 24 – with 24 actually being the total number of candidates interviewed in the region. Is 24 an untypically low number of candidates for a region or are the files structured so badly it takes "several days" to merge a few hundred rows?
- sidewndr46 3y ago
  I'm unsure what your background is, but I've seen processes at companies like this. It would take several days to a week to aggregate less than a hundred data points and present it.
  - richbell 3y ago
    One of the first things I did as an intern was write an Excel macro that pulled data from SharePoint and built a monthly "dashboard" in the span of a few minutes. The previous process involved someone spending the better part of 2 weeks building the monthly report by hand, every single month.
    - Rebelgecko 3y ago
      I did something similar. The person whose process was being automated hated it, because they got more work that was more challenging.
      - db48x 3y ago
        Could be worse. I’ve read stories where the report was the only reason the person was hired, and the boss didn’t even bother trying to find different work for them to do.
db48x 3y ago
> The NHS suffers from a chronic shortage of anesthetists. Last year, the Association of Anaesthetists found a shortfall of 1,400 staffers – or 14 percent of roles – while finding that 25 percent of the specialists currently working for the org plan to leave the NHS in five years. Seems like in addition to a failure to understand and use even the most basic technology, they’ve decided to do a lot of complicated work to rank all the applicants instead of just hiring everybody who graduated from medical school.
- RecycledEle 3y ago
  Anesthesiologists kill a lot of patients. I would not let an anaesthesiologist from the bottom half of their class in their first year of practice put me under.
  - db48x 3y ago
    Are you saying that half of the graduates from Britain's medical schools are unqualified? That's pretty damning all on its own.
  - devilbunny 3y ago
    > Anesthesiologists kill a lot of patients. People who are about to die often get emergency surgery, and guess which doctor the family usually meets only after their loved one is dead? Is it easy to bump people off with anesthesia? Sure. But a whole lot of surgical complications, both expected and unexpected, get blamed on "the anesthesia". When someone dies during or immediately after surgery, it's easy to blame the surgery. But if that patient didn't have a life-threatening illness going on, they probably wouldn't have had the surgery. We don't do purely elective surgery (e.g., joint replacements - they're not "elective" as in purely optional, but as in "not getting one for a month won't kill you") on people who aren't optimized, but sometimes, you don't have time to get them into the best possible condition. A truly unexpected death is a rarity in the OR. It happens, but we've had pretty much the same suite of monitors for the past 30-35 years or so, so safety hasn't seen anything like the vast jumps it made in the 30-35 years before that. The Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation, founded 1985, was the first organization that involved multiple groups of stakeholders (clinicians, drug makers, device makers) in identifying safety risks, and they continue to review closed claims (settled or judged at trial) for possible new risks (e.g., they were able to have the drug rapacuronium withdrawn from the market because the closed-claims database functioned as a post-introduction surveillance system). Since this is about the UK, "first year of practice" means even less than it does in the US - their post-med-school path is longer and slower than here in the US and Canada.
blah_why_not 3y ago
[flagged]
mensetmanusman 3y ago
Apparently the worst thing you could do to your child (in terms of paperwork and confusion) is to name them Null.
- webmaven 3y ago
  https://xkcd.com/327/ https://xkcd.com/327/
  - sleepytimetea 3y ago
    little bobby tables !
RecycledEle 3y ago
Basically, they reversed the order of the rankings of the interview scores by screwing up a VLOOKUP in Excel. Always have a human double check the output of every Excel formula.
tuatoru 3y ago
Cue Gerald Weinberg quote:- If architects built houses the way programmers write software, one woodpecker could bring about the collapse of civilisation. -- although the problem is managers, not programmers.
- soul_grafitti 3y ago
  This wasn't a case where any programmers were involved. It was users.
jdechko 3y ago
Looks like it’s time for a new Matt Parker spreadsheet video!

51 points by jjgreen 3y ago

> Each of the seven [UK] recruitment regions creates a separate spreadsheet, but these have no standardised template, naming convention or structure. After being manually amended, all of the various scores are entered into a Master spreadsheet. This is carried out row-by-row and takes several days, likely to be subject to interruptions > In the process, a ranking column [..] had been wrongly transferred [..], erroneously appearing as an interview score. After their interviews, candidates were ranked 1 to 24 – with 24 actually being the total number of candidates interviewed in the region. Is 24 an untypically low number of candidates for a region or are the files structured so badly it takes "several days" to merge a few hundred rows?

sidewndr46 3y ago
I'm unsure what your background is, but I've seen processes at companies like this. It would take several days to a week to aggregate less than a hundred data points and present it.
- richbell 3y ago
  One of the first things I did as an intern was write an Excel macro that pulled data from SharePoint and built a monthly "dashboard" in the span of a few minutes. The previous process involved someone spending the better part of 2 weeks building the monthly report by hand, every single month.
  - Rebelgecko 3y ago
    I did something similar. The person whose process was being automated hated it, because they got more work that was more challenging.
    - db48x 3y ago
      Could be worse. I’ve read stories where the report was the only reason the person was hired, and the boss didn’t even bother trying to find different work for them to do.

db48x 3y ago

> The NHS suffers from a chronic shortage of anesthetists. Last year, the Association of Anaesthetists found a shortfall of 1,400 staffers – or 14 percent of roles – while finding that 25 percent of the specialists currently working for the org plan to leave the NHS in five years. Seems like in addition to a failure to understand and use even the most basic technology, they’ve decided to do a lot of complicated work to rank all the applicants instead of just hiring everybody who graduated from medical school.

RecycledEle 3y ago
Anesthesiologists kill a lot of patients. I would not let an anaesthesiologist from the bottom half of their class in their first year of practice put me under.
- db48x 3y ago
  Are you saying that half of the graduates from Britain's medical schools are unqualified? That's pretty damning all on its own.
- devilbunny 3y ago
  > Anesthesiologists kill a lot of patients. People who are about to die often get emergency surgery, and guess which doctor the family usually meets only after their loved one is dead? Is it easy to bump people off with anesthesia? Sure. But a whole lot of surgical complications, both expected and unexpected, get blamed on "the anesthesia". When someone dies during or immediately after surgery, it's easy to blame the surgery. But if that patient didn't have a life-threatening illness going on, they probably wouldn't have had the surgery. We don't do purely elective surgery (e.g., joint replacements - they're not "elective" as in purely optional, but as in "not getting one for a month won't kill you") on people who aren't optimized, but sometimes, you don't have time to get them into the best possible condition. A truly unexpected death is a rarity in the OR. It happens, but we've had pretty much the same suite of monitors for the past 30-35 years or so, so safety hasn't seen anything like the vast jumps it made in the 30-35 years before that. The Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation, founded 1985, was the first organization that involved multiple groups of stakeholders (clinicians, drug makers, device makers) in identifying safety risks, and they continue to review closed claims (settled or judged at trial) for possible new risks (e.g., they were able to have the drug rapacuronium withdrawn from the market because the closed-claims database functioned as a post-introduction surveillance system). Since this is about the UK, "first year of practice" means even less than it does in the US - their post-med-school path is longer and slower than here in the US and Canada.

blah_why_not 3y ago

[flagged]

mensetmanusman 3y ago

Apparently the worst thing you could do to your child (in terms of paperwork and confusion) is to name them Null.

webmaven 3y ago
https://xkcd.com/327/ https://xkcd.com/327/
- sleepytimetea 3y ago
  little bobby tables !

RecycledEle 3y ago

Basically, they reversed the order of the rankings of the interview scores by screwing up a VLOOKUP in Excel. Always have a human double check the output of every Excel formula.

tuatoru 3y ago

Cue Gerald Weinberg quote:- If architects built houses the way programmers write software, one woodpecker could bring about the collapse of civilisation. -- although the problem is managers, not programmers.

soul_grafitti 3y ago
This wasn't a case where any programmers were involved. It was users.

jdechko 3y ago

Looks like it’s time for a new Matt Parker spreadsheet video!