Spuddling… great word, isn’t it? But what does it actually mean?
According to the Your Dictionary online, the verb ‘spuddle’ means ‘to make a lot of fuss about trivial things, as if they were important’. The online Urban Dictionary takes this further, telling us that spuddle is a West country word meaning to waste time and not get on with the task in hand. In a nutshell, we would say that a ‘spuddler’ who takes part in ‘spuddling’ is a person who wastes time getting bogged down in irrelevant information and who often presents us with meaningless data as though it were significant!
So now you know the definition, do you encounter people working in the NHS and healthcare who you participate in mindless spuddling? Worse still, are you guilty of spuddling?
First of all, to take a step back and to give credit where credit is due… we first came across the word last year thanks to an excellent talk on ‘Making Data Count’ by Karen Hallyer as part of our Non-Medical Prescribing conference. We’ve since learned a lot more via the work of the NHS Improvement Team led by Sam Riley who is worth following on Twitter via @SamRiley. Indeed, we encourage you to take a look at their work here. Moreover, why not invite them to visit your organisation and deliver their superb free training to your team?
So hands up, now you know more about spuddling, are you guilty of it? To a certain degree we are probably all guilty of spuddling in our personal and professional lives. Let’s be honest, we all have a propensity to collect mindless data and convince ourselves that it is important!
Here is a good example from the CASC team. Last year we reached 1,000 followers on Twitter, which you would think represents a milestone to be celebrated! However, when you dig a little deeper, the statistics show this is actually pretty meaningless. Here’s why: we launched our Twitter account in August 2009, which means it has taken us over 10 years and more than 3,650 days to accumulate 1,000 Twitter followers!!! In other words, on average 1 person signs up to our Twitter every 3.65 days, that’s less than 2 per week! Hardly a strike rate that is going to worry Katy Perry or Barack Obama! And what is more, that data massages the real truth as a number of our followers are sex workers! Who knew that prostitutes and escorts were so interested in clinical audit? On a serious note, we sincerely thank any of you out there who follow us on Twitter, but for us to make any noise about reaching 1,000 followers would clearly be a gross act of spuddling!
And it is not just us… it honestly won’t take you long to find examples of people working in the world of audit who are massively over-stating the importance of data. Here is one example from the recent HQIP ‘Impact Report’ (available here) focusing on national audits they commission. This document includes lots of data, but one that caught our eye was ‘3,447 people visited the National Ophthalmology Database website since the report was published in July 2017.’ Given the HQIP Impact Report was published 19 months later in February 2019 it is reasonable to assume that the 3,447 people visited over a 15-month period or approximately 450 days. This means that on average less than 8 people per day visit the NOD website. For us, that is not impressive for a large-scale national project.
What is the final message? Wee have three pieces of advice. First of all, familiarise yourselves with the ‘Making Data Count’ work and join their revolution to banish meaningless data that wastes time. Second, have a good hard look at yourself and think seriously about whether you are guilty of spuddling. And finally, be super vigilant and look out for examples of spuddling in your working lives. And challenge the people who you think spuddle. After all, we have enough data to deal with and manage in our working lives, let’s make sure that when we are presenting information, we are presenting meaningful and useful stuff!
PS… We attended a #plotthedots day in Birmingham run by Sam Riley and her team at NHS Improvement and this helped us come up with the Mr Spuddle concept (who is obviously) based on the Mr. Men books). You’ll find Mr. Spuddle’s adventures via our Twitter @cascleicester. If you use Twitter, we recommend also searching for #plotthedots