Return to our Roots

“Listen up, Julie. We may be returning to our roots.”

“If you think that’s going to make you any younger, Curmudge, you’ll be disappointed.”

“I mean our blogs, Kaizen Curmudgeon and Curmudgeon’s Wastebasket. Remember how Kaizen Curmudgeon began in May 2007. Our intent was to document the progress of our Lean transformation at Affinity. Although we couldn’t always focus on Affinity, we were able to limit ourselves to Lean and its required leadership. We maintained that through the middle of October 2008. Then our anticipated local contributions failed to materialize. While waiting, we expanded our scope further into health care and leadership topics that might be of interest to our readers. We are still waiting and writing about topics from the literature that our readers might not otherwise encounter.”

“In those early days, Curmudge, draft postings that were rejected by our reviewers were, literally, dumped into your wastebasket. Then in January 2010 we formalized your trash can into a new blog, Curmudgeon’s Wastebasket. During the last half of 2010 and the first part of 2011, Wastebasket was populated by e-mails describing emergency medicine as practiced on the battlefields of Afghanistan. Since then, that blog has been relatively dormant.”

“Dormant no longer, Julie. It has been suggested that we return Kaizen Curmudgeon to its roots and limit it to discussions of Lean at Affinity. Most future discussions of other topics formerly posted in Kaizen Curmudgeon will be posted here in Curmudgeon’s Wastebasket.”

“Wow, Curmudge. Think of all the topics our Kaizen Curmudgeon readers would have missed if this limitation had been in place for the past three years: Patient Safety, Mistakes, Checklists, Amazing Devices, Evidence-Based Medicine, The Crystal Ball, The Laboratory, Sepsis, Primary Care Medicine, and more.”

“One might call missing those postings unintended consequences. So geht es im Leben.”

“You meant to say, ‘such is life,’ Curmudge. Postings on Kaizen Curmudgeon will quite likely become less frequent. Our new path forward will require more effort, but we’ll make the best of it.”

"As usual, Jaded Julie, you’ve got that right.”