OK, this is probably funny to no one but us residents, but in our hospital's relentless push to perfection, they have focused attention (ahem...wonder why) on the rate of falls in the hospital. If you're familiar with "The House of God" story, you know all about hospital falls, and even how they can occasionally serve a purpose. However, in general, they're bad. In our hospital, they're a pretty good benchmark of the care you get on each floor, and each floor is different.

For example, there is one floor ruled by an ancient doyenne of a charge nurse, who, I imagine, counts General Patton among her idols. Things run with the precision of a Swiss timepiece on that floor, and as we speak, they are currently on day 19 of no falls. I'd be willing to bet that the fall 19 days ago was likely with a nurse floating from another floor.

By comparison, there is another, not-to-be-named floor, in our hospital, where our team proposed that it would be safer if the patients were all simply placed on the floor on arrival. I have noticed in the last week that this floor has not even bothered to put up the "X days since fall" sign.

The picture of the floor posted above, was a floor where our team had a large number of patients over the last month, so we spent a lot of time there. Our med students religously kept watch over the board, and one day were swearing that the nurses had skipped a day, and had gone from 1 day to 3, and were in fact cheating.