False solutions from the courts do not fix poor public and private management
The inertia of the executive branch and the poor management of companies in the private sector often lead the Judiciary to interfere in and regulate management. This may be to address complaints about health plans, mobile phone companies, insurers, etc.
However, this role of the courts should be minimized so they can focus on essential issues and even on new topics. But the interference frequently involves basic management issues.
A recent example was the case of the Federal Court that made it mandatory for all public employees, such as physicians and dentists, who work in the SUS health units in Rio Branco, Acre, to clock in on an electronic time clock. The lawsuit was filed by the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office of Acre (MPF-AC).
According to the case, the action “aims to guarantee the existence of control mechanisms that inhibit irregularities in the services performed by the Unified Health System, both in order to give its users effective oversight of the quality of the services provided and to materialize the transparency that must exist in the acts of the Public Administration", as reported, for example, by Globo's G1 website.
In other words, health workers were allegedly not effectively complying with their working hours. This would be further harming the already very precarious public health care.
The solution, then, would be the mandatory electronic time clock, because, by requiring entry and exit to be recorded, it would guarantee the physical presence of the health worker throughout the entire working period and, therefore, their work and care.
How is it possible for another branch of power to have to reach this level of interference? Where are the managers of these hospitals? Why are they not able to get people to show up for work?
If there are employees who receive salaries and do not show up for work, this is a management failure as elementary as it is serious.
We know that these health professionals often have multiple jobs. And that more adequate pay would come from accumulating many hours of work in various places.
However, simply instituting an electronic time clock will not guarantee a solution to the problem of public health care. It may give rise to other ways of cheating. And citizens will continue without care if managers do not effectively take on their roles.
For a long time, private companies, good or bad, efficient or incompetent, have adopted electronic time clocks in their workplaces. And it is certainly not this procedure that guarantees the success of one organization or another.
It is interesting to note that “false solutions” like this one always share the common characteristic of adopting procedures that in some way graze and even touch the problem one wants to solve.
It is essential that public physicians comply with their working hours. But in no way are these pseudo-solutions able to reach the “root cause” that is really generating the failure.
In other words, what is the real problem that would be causing physicians and health workers in Acre not to serve the local population efficiently, which, by the way, occurs in most of Brazilian public health care?
Is it just a matter of the professional's “physical presence”? Or is the problem more complex, with other root causes, such as, for example, poor management of resources, a phenomenon that already begins “up there”, in the high spheres of government?
And there is, here, an even more obvious question that I want to insist on: if physicians and employees were not complying with their working hours, should it not be up to their leaders and immediate managers to notice this and seek solutions? And where are, and what are, the bosses of these managers doing?
These false solutions, which occur very frequently, on all sides, seem to try to remove the real responsibility of managers and leaders to do their jobs well. The courts interfere in the executive, but, for their part, many legal proceedings take years and years to be decided.
Or do you believe that the mere existence of complex public tenders and auctions is, in itself, an efficient way to guarantee transparent and efficient purchasing processes?
Or that a complex regulation of health services will, by itself, be able to keep hospitals and health plans from “pushing” more and more procedures onto increasingly exhausted customers?
Leaders and managers, public and private, must take on their real responsibilities. And stop hiding behind false solutions or, worse, submitting to interference from the Judiciary, with its also limited solutions.
