An Exercise In Logic

At work, we've been told that when discharging patients, we must refer them to our smoking cessation classes. Silly me, I just assumed that they meant for us to do this if the patient actually smokes. But no, they want every patient to be referred, including nonsmokers. Their logic in making this rule is that the patient might have a family member who smokes who might get the referral passed on to them.

So, I'm thinking, we have tons of classes for just about every health problem. There are diabetes classes, heart disease classes, obesity classes and so on. Why don't we refer every patient to those classes as well. After all, the odds are good that someone in their family has a health problem addressed by one of our classes. Why restrict it to just smoking?

And, of course, it's not enough to just give the patients the referral phone numbers, we are also expected to call and sign them up for a class. If we're signing the nonsmokers up for stop smoking classes, than we might as well enroll them in the dozen or so other classes that we offer.

The administrators aren't trying nearly hard enough to create work for us. I'll have to bring my idea to their attention at once. NOT!