Get Your Health System Slimmed-Down & Beach-Ready With Lester's Word Salad

Hello, Doctor Lester Levy here. My motto: ‘More clinical staff? I thought you wanted more cynical staff!’

Ha! Just a little joke there because laughter is the best medicine. And when I say ‘best’, I mean ‘cheapest’.

Are you loving spring? I am! It’s a time for getting the health system all slimmed down and beach-ready. And it’s also time when reporters and select committee members can drop by unexpectedly, hungry for ‘facts’.  That’s when you need to whip up one of Lester’s Word Salads.

The great thing about my word salads is that you can make them up on the fly from whatever management cliches you’ve got lying around. That said, there’s always a few useful staples I keep on hand that I can quickly assemble. You can’t go wrong with tossing together these favourites:

‘That’s an operational matter’

‘It’s not appropriate for me to make comment on that’

‘We have to bring it back to the budget’

‘I’m not the right person to talk to about that’

‘I have called for a review so we can have a baseline and some hard data’

‘We need to increase our productivity. Staff don’t need to work harder, they just need to need to work differently’

I especially love that last one – it’s seen me through a lot - and it’s especially good when followed up by ‘That’s an operational matter’.

Let’s demonstrate how easily I can put together one of Lester’s Word Salads. Ooh look, here’s a reporter with an appetite for answers: