Magda wrote, sounding a little disspirited, that << Also, sorry to say,
having been inside a BFI (UK) hospital, accreditation is only the beginning.
And maybe not even that, in some cases. >>
But this is always true!
In fact, to be perhaps a bit more inflammatory about it, the focus on
accreditation for its own sake is not so different from the "numbers game" we
all complain about. Any accreditation -- even the ones we love :) -- is an
emphasis on some arbitrary standard that can be verified, which may or may
not stand in effectively for intuition about and flexibility toward and
committment to a particular style of care.
Just as specifying numbers like 6-8 wets, or .75 ounce / day, are overly
reductionist but can still provide a safety net to help some babies, so too
the insistence on accreditations -- for individuals, for hospitals, in
general -- can limit the benefits we get from a wide range of practices and
skills, but still provide a safety net to keep really awful practices and
really totally untrained practitioners from the field.
I guess that's why I am impatient with, say, Heather's really strongly
principled objection to numbers. Yeah, they're bad. But the alternatives
so often seem worse. What we need to do, IMO, is teach BETTER numbers --
get better accreditation -- to people who start off clueless. Then, when
they reach the really advanced stage and already have some built in intuition
about numbers not being the be-all and end-all, that can be the time to treat
those numbers, those accreditations, as "just the beginning." That way we
can avoid making the perfect into the enemy of the good.
Elisheva Urbas, NYC
waxing philosophical this week -- if I don't go nomail soon I'm not going to
get any work done today...
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