It’s tempting, isn’t it, when trying to explain something, to keep on using more and more words to get your point across?
We all know how much more difficult it is to say something succinctly than to waffle on. As Blaise Pascal said back in 1657, “I’m sorry I wrote you such a long letter; I didn’t have time to write a short one.”
There are often good reasons for keeping it short, and none more so than in the busy world of healthcare. Families may be asked to provide information about their relative being cared for in hospital, but if the resulting document is pages and pages long the sad reality is that it will rarely get read. Much as the staff want to, they do not have time to sit down and sift out the really important things that will make a difference to the care they deliver.
So when we were developing Mycarematters, keeping it short was an attribute we deliberately retained from the original charts. On those, physical space was the limiting factor but we soon saw how it encouraged people to think carefully and prioritise what was really important. We ask people to do the same when creating a Mycarematters profile online, so that a person’s core needs and preferences can all fit on a single side of A4. In that way, hospital staff will see a snapshot view of the things that matter, and are much more likely to scan their eyes across the printout (or scroll through some brief data online) than rifle through multiple pages.
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