I work in a job where measurement is everything. Essentially, if the government decided to stop measuring hospital discharge medication review I would be without a job. However, healthcare is not the only place where measurement has become a huge part of the conversation, but you see it in education and in many other lines of work. In fact, there are many out there that believe that if you can’t measure it, you should not be doing it.
When I think about measuring performance, quality, etc., I think the intent for all of it is a good one. We want to know we are doing better or worse, and we don’t want to just assume all is going well. However, I have thought for awhile and continue to think that we are have started to go overboard with this measurement thing.
Quality measures in healthcare or measures of any kind cannot be the end-all, be-all of what guides our work and our lives. It can help, but you cannot measure everything. Thinking about measurement and depression, how can you truly measure mood and improvement? There are surveys and scales, but no one can truly measure how someone feels. How would you measure the pain someone with depression experiences? How would you measure the relief when someone with depression gets better? It seems silly to me to think we can measure it all.
How about you? Do you think our urge to measure everything has gone too far? Are we forgetting the immeasurable things that are just as important in the human experience? My hope is that we begin to better balance the role or measurement in our lives.