The IT man cometh

Written by: D. Nedry

I don’t know about anyone else, but I am getting more and more frustrated with the IT ‘support’ provided to our practice.

I can never get hold of anyone when I need to, if I desperately need something for the practice like a replacement for a 15 year old printer I am told that there are none available and when I need an engineer to come to the building they seem to be as rare as hens teeth. And yet, for no immediately obvious reason, they keep turning up at the practice unannounced to replace equipment that seems to be in perfect working order.

I’m not sure if this is something local or a problem across the country, but decisions about IT budgets and spending seem entirely illogical to me. But then, it’s not my business to know how those budgets are allocated and to be frank, I have enough to think about without pondering this techno-puzzle but what drives me absolutely round the bend are the things that we, or I must do to enable this bizarre cherry picking of IT needs.

For example, last week I had to check every single monitor in the practice for a particular model number and screen size, and that is no mean feat. We have a lot of rooms and a lot of computers, and the part about it I couldn’t fathom, was why I was doing it at 7pm on a Monday night? Why was I frantically rushing to get this done when it really wasn’t a top priority task for my practice?

I realised that actually I was making a rod for my own back by agreeing to do it in the first place. At 7pm on a Monday I should be at home with my family (probably with a glass of wine), not running around with a clipboard and a set of keys dashing past the cleaners to get in and out of rooms. So, I’ve decided on a new approach.

If something is so important that IT absolutely positively need it doing ASAP/yesterday, then quite frankly they can come and do it themselves. From this point on, I’m just refusing to jump to IT’s schedule because actually, I think that getting on with my own day job is more important to patients than replacing an old monitor that works just fine!

I am sure I will make some enemies in the IT department, but with everything else we have to juggle at present, I don’t really care. I care about my practice, my team and our patients, and if IT don’t like it, they can stick it up their modem.

I think we should all adopt this attitude and make our IT departments work for us.

And so today, when I received another email from IT asking me to look for a piece of equipment at our practice, I asked them why they don’t have a record of where their equipment is allocated, and why they couldn’t send someone out to look for it themselves instead of wasting my time and the time of the practice team.

There was silence for a while…but eventually I had this reply…

‘We’ll be on site tomorrow’

It’s a little win sure, but it’s saved me a bit of time today and surely in these ever changing, completely bonkers times we need all the little wins we can get.