I have often thought the ‘bosses’ I have dealt with during my career suffer from a ‘syndrome’. It’s what I call the ‘five-minute syndrome’. In a surgery, this is time it takes for a patient to consult with a doctor, and those suffering from this ‘syndrome’ take the view that everything and anything can be done in five minutes.

Always Another Agenda

Therefore you may notice that your daily conversations with GP employers will last no more than five minutes, ten if you’re lucky. Many develop tactics to deal with this phenomenon, like sharing coffee time. But there is always something else on the agenda to avoid long conversations: “It’s the start of my surgery”, “I have patient’s waiting” or “I have a meeting at the CCG”.

Without being able to have a chat, you might see if fit to send an email or internal message, but email has its flaws. In order to be read, it needs to be brief, which doesn’t give much scope for detail.  As a result you are often ‘cut short’ and forced to choose moments such as practice meetings to air your points, which inevitably get quashed by more time constraints.

‘C’ is the third letter………

The problem for a GP Practice Manager is the constant deluge of tasks to manage. All these tasks take a varying amount of time to complete, which isn’t necessarily recognised by your contemporaries.

To demonstrate this to your GP’s, keep a ‘to do’ list with the time it takes to complete them. Remember, to keep you (and them) on your toes, there is the CCG, the CQC, Complaints, Cash flow problems, Claims to make, Contingencies to allow for and Catastrophes to keep the day interesting. Once your list reaches 50 items email it to each doctor and present it at your appraisal.

Syndromes  

I am not saying that this ‘Syndrome’ is limited to our professional colleagues, but we have all come across characters during our working lives that time constrain our contact with them to the point of rudeness. The five-minute syndrome joins in my mind with the ‘clear desk syndrome’. The clear desk suggests the person you are dealing with is either a perfect manager or actually has nothing to do.

The email alternative

The number of emails you receive daily far exceeds the numbers of ‘letters’ you might have received 10 years ago. To cope with this you adopt a policy of read the subject line, read the first line, read the last line (looking for a deadline) and either answer it, spam it or trash it.

Every second counts, so you now spend your day pressing the delete button as often as you can. The keyboard has become your quick ‘communicator’ and you’ve developed the skill of being decisive (not divisive). But what happened to your conversational and persuasive skills and face to face contact? Now everything’s in an email.

It’s catching

So as I conclude this tirade, it seems we all suffer from the syndrome I recognised in doctors. But worringly has the five-minute syndrome reduced to just five seconds? Are we now suffering from what I might call a ‘time lapse’ syndrome where minutes have become seconds? If so, I now have that ‘syndrome’ too!

Robert Campbell