A hospital system - one organization, many parts

The hospital where I work is part of a larger organization that is made up of 3 hospitals, along with various clinics, pharmacies and other facilities and offices that are spread throughout northeast Iowa. The organization is staffed with people who do all kinds of work: physicians, nurses, secretaries, administrators, housekeepers, nurse aides, dietary workers, managers, lab assistants, maintenance workers, materials and distribution workers, and so much more. I was just reading a report that shows that as of June 30, 2008, there were 3,020 associates who worked in one way or another in the organization.

It's pretty easy to walk into a medical clinic or a hospital and give no thought to what and who actually makes the place run. But with me being a part of this organization - and being one who happens to visit a handful of the clinics and other offices daily (I'm a courier) - I have sort of an 'insiders look' at what makes it all run. In the various places I go, I interact with lots of different associates every day, of all types of different occupations, and I can see how so many seemingly little things work together to make it all happen. And the thing is, when everyone is doing their job, the whole thing generally works out very well!

But what if a person who is trained as a physical therapist were to go in and try to perform heart surgery? Or what if an office manager were to go in and attempt to cook the patients' meals? What if a courier (me) saw a nurse drawing a patient's blood and said, "here, let me take over for you!" I don't think the patient would appreciate that very much! Not to mention that that would mess up the entire system, and there would be disastrous results.

See, for our purposes here, the system works this way (in general): The patient comes in with a problem. The secretary handles the necessary paperwork. The physician works to diagnose the problem. The nurse draws the blood. I come and take the blood to the lab. The lab techs run the tests on the blood. They then send the test results to the office, where the secretary files them and gives them to the physician, and the physician gives the patient the proper care by either prescribing medicine, a medical procedure, more tests, etc, etc, all of which requires other staff within the organization to do their own jobs!

Each associate plays a very important part in the whole process. So again, with the what if's... What if the nurse drove the blood from the clinic to the hospital? Who would be there to draw blood on other patients and do all the other duties of a nurse? What if the physician had to handle all the paperwork? Who would treat the patients? What if the lab techs decided they wanted to see the patients themselves and try to diagnose their problems? Could they properly diagnose the problems? And who would run the lab tests on the blood? I'm being absurd to make an obvious point. With each person doing what they're specifically set apart to do, the organization runs well. And really this is only a very tiny glimpse into the many roles that each of the above people play.

No one in the organization is unimportant. Sure, some of the higher-paid doctors act like snobs... LOL... but yet they couldn't do what they do unless everyone else was doing what they do. And some of the lower-paid associates may feel unimportant when they compare themselves to some of the higher profile associates, but yet if you remove them from their positions, the whole thing can fall apart quickly! Each person does their part, and allows others to do their parts.

In my "One Body..." post I said that in this post I would give some practical applications to life in the Body of Christ... and really I didn't intend to go quite so far with this one particular example, so the next post will be where I had intended to go. Still, to me the hospital system example is a great example of how there are no unimportant parts in a "body" and how it's important that each person knows their part and sticks to it, and doesn't try to be what they're not!