Among the lessons I am trying to learn, as we navigate the COVID-19 pandemic, is how best to learn from inefficiency. Let me explain. It seems to me that at our best, as a society, we aspire to efficiency in pursuit of excellence. This pursuit entails looking for ways to maximize our time and resources; a focus on improving skill sets and finding ways to enhance productivity. In public health, we pursue efficiency towards the aim of shaping a healthier world. This lends itself to a particular worldview in which we tend to see events through the lens of the conditions that shape health and our commitment to improving these conditions.
This perspective informed our response during COVID, yielding both success and some shortcomings. It allowed us to get much right, helping us provide the public with effective recommendations as we navigated the pandemic. But a fair assessment of our performance during COVID would have to concede that we also had some blind spots, areas which fell outside our perspective, exposing the limits of our collective focus. We did not always account for the degree to which partisan politics mediated how populations engaged with public health recommendations, nor were we always effective at seeing our own biases and how they informed mistrust among the populations we serve. Instead, we did what we do—focused on the core aims of our field, worked to refine our methods, and proceeded from there.
This suggests that there is more to getting better at our mission of supporting health than the efficient pursuit of our core focus to the exclusion of all else. There is also the richness that comes from the interstices, from seeming inefficiencies, from the detours which ultimately take us to a different, perhaps better, destination then where we thought we were going.
Read the full post on The Healthiest Goldfish.