willray

Oh come on, it's too early in the day for blindsiding people with that kind wit. I now need to clean the coffee out of my keyboard. We've been on EPIC, I think pretty much from the start - probably 15? 17 years now? And our physicians still need to keep backup paper copies of their charting records because EPIC so reliably loses or corrupts them. My PCP, as well as a couple specialists, have been re-entering the same data about a cardiac event I suffered, at every visit for going on 4 years now, and the fact that I have a stent still comes as a surprise to every new clinician I intera

I think the difference, is that generally at Church, Work, and your Children's School, there is an expectation that an essentially immediate medical response is available. Even on normal weekend campouts, even if they're car-camping, Scouts and Scouters are likely to end up far enough from an immediate response by emergency professionals that the unit adults/scouts may have to provide emergency care for 30 minutes or more. That care could require access to some health history information. I suspect you'll find that most organizations, Church, Work, School, etc, if they're going to put

Don't just come back and read, tell me what works, or doesn't, with your unit!

I'm afraid I have to differ. Having had one of our adults go down, with what looked like a heart attack when we were on an overnight weekend campout, I'm grateful for the medical history details in our adult medical forms. We weren't at Philmont, we were just at a small state park campsite in Ohio, 20-minutes dead run from the nearest cell phone signal, and about an hour from the nearest emergency-response team that could launch an ambulance. You don't need to be in the backcountry to need information now, and for that information to be critical for keeping you alive. "They're an adult, th

I think there's room for differing opinions with respect to whether that's treating adults as adults, or as spoiled children who will take their ball and go home if they don't get their way 🙂 That aside, it sounds like you're suggesting that we add a requirement, in addition to the 2-registered adults, for an EMT to be present at all scout activities where health-forms are required? I think Scouting can probably survive with those adults who are unwilling to trust a unit leader with their medical form, staying home, better than it can survive a requirement that units have an EMT on-site

Parts A and B, the only parts required for standard activities, do not require a signature by a health-care provider (except in a few states where apparently a health-care provider's signature is required to permit someone else to dispense medications to youth).

To the do-ers go the rights to decide how to do: "We have to do X for the Blue and Gold meal, that's how it's always been done!" -> "Great! Thanks for volunteering to take care of the B&G meal! Would you like any help with that?". Or, if you're planning on doing something different -> "Well, Jim has already volunteered to take care of that this year, and I think he's planning on doing Y instead, but if you'd like to do the meal for next year, we can put you down as our lead volunteer right now!"

I should actually say - a large part of the reason for HIPAA in the first place, is that you have very little control of what's in "your medical record" as your doctor accesses it. On the other hand, you have complete control over what goes on the Part A and Part B health forms. If there is something that you don't want anyone to know about, don't put it on the form. If you're absolutely certain that no-one has any legitimate need for the information, why include it on the form? Now, if you leave something off, and either you are harmed, or harm someone else because of the omission, t

Oh, my no. You can't even get Medical doctors and nurses to up to full compliance with regular mandatory trainings and a giant cudgel to bash them if they step out of line.😖 And yes, you absolutely do train the janitors and receptionists regarding data safeguarding - at least up to the level of "under no circumstances may you ever do X". A janitor who snaps a selfie with a patient, or a receptionist who tweets "guess who just walked in the door", is going to be in for a world of hurt. 20 minutes of training would be perfectly fine for "don't be an idiot, the medical forms are private

It doesn’t appear to me that the current system costs anything for exactly that level of service? You you do understand that if BSA literally required HIPAA compliance, your out-of-pocket cost to participate in any BSA event would increase by probably at least $50, more likely considerably more, per person, per event? Unless you actually know what you’re asking for there, I would caution against you recommending it. You would like medical records to be more private - I don’t disagree with that at all - but your comments suggest that you have no idea of eith

Your doctor probably spends 20% to 40% of the total insurance-billed-cost of your exam, exclusively on HIPAA compliance. Would you like to pay an additional $50 or so per BSA event that you attend, to have BSA handle your medical information similarly?

I guess I'll carp about a couple other things as well: One is that the lack of specificity of things like "show evidence" leads to people being willing to sign off on requirements like that, without the scout actually doing what the requirement intends. I can "show evidence" of 10 different kinds of native plants with a handful of soil and leaf-litter from the forest floor. I can actually do what the requirement intends, and explain something about why the evidence supports there being at least 10 different kinds of native plants represented too, but the typical scout or adult signing o

Heh - it's all helpful from my point of view. In an economics sense, your tootsie-roll-box at the campsite is a form of trust game, so it's possibly helpful to think about other formulations of the same underlying principle. Usually (in the economics sense) in a competition, trust-games are better at pointing out sub-optimal behavior, than at encouraging good behavior, but It's additionally (possibly only academically) interesting to think about whether there are trust-game based competitions that positively reinforce good behavior. At the end of the day, my goal is to collect ideas

The fact that everyone, youth and adults alike, seem to have devolved into thinking that the rank-patch/merit-badge/etc. is the reward, rather than it being a symbol that they've mastered the material. "I want to earn 2nd-class, because then my father will let me ..., but I don't want to have to learn all these stupid ...", rather than understanding that the learning itself is the reward. Couple this with the scouts who have advanced through this system of "first class first year!", and "Eagle by 14!" patch-bling-based "advancement" now being the senior scouts doing the mentoring, and y

I'm painfully familiar with win-all-you-can (and for anyone who's not, please don't go look it up). Still, I don't think I'd argue that all trust-games are inappropriate for youth. The spider-web is a trust-game*, and really, most good patrol-forming activities are forms of trust games as well. The "force struggle, so that they can grow out of the struggle by seeing where they could have better-applied Scouting values" is a version of this as well. Most of the advice in this area is just tossed out as a "just do it", without much guidance regarding what works and what doesn't, and some pe

I believe I have reasonable evidence that at least some of what I'm trying to do, resonates with the scouts. We'll know more after a year or so of testing ideas and seeing how our PLC morphs them into their own creations. That being said, like Le Corbusier, I could design grand and perfect schemes for Scout Values-reinforcing activities in my head all day long, but it's the details of implementation and practicality of whether the scouts actually find them interesting and valuable to engage in, that makes any of this worth doing. That's why I think it's worth looking at other's experien

So -- We also have a year-long interpatrol competition, and it's part of the reason that I decided that some principled research in this area was warranted. I'm convinced that as we implement it, a year-long competition does almost nothing to reinforce any Scoutly habits/mindset that we'd like it to. To be sure, we have one campout where the competition is a primary focus, and the scouts have fun. Unfortunately, the potential reward is separated from the actions by such a large period of time (days, is really too much) that it doesn't really trigger the reward-satisfaction biochemistry loop

I'd like to talk about this a bit: Does anyone have thoughts on the potential or value of "meta competitions", where the actual point isn't winning the competition, but rather is to make the right choices and avoid the non-scoutly gaming of the system that's possible? Some of you will have experience with one specific, particularly ham-handed version of this idea. It's clear that this can be done in a fashion that's blatant, painful, and gets old real fast, but I'm wondering if anyone has experience with, or ideas for versions that would be fresh and interesting, and would help the

I agree that the idea of a competition for "doing the right thing" sounds weird. However, "doing the right thing" is a skill that can be (and needs to be!) developed and honed, just like any other. I would suggest that the reason that competitions for "doing the right thing" sound weird, is because it's so much easier to do competitions for simple skills, and so we gravitate towards taking the easy road and setting up competitions that don't require much thought. To take that as a reason to avoid "doing the right thing" competitions doesn't sound too Scoutly to me. The "doing the right th

Heh - I'm going to have to pick your brain for ideas on how to deal with some of this, probably in some other thread, so we don't dilute this one - we've got one patrol with a scout who is /really/ struggling with learning to be a helpful member of his patrol, and so far he has been, let's say resistant, to any attempts to motivate him in the right direction, whether from his patrol leader, SPL, or any of the adults...

The patrol-flag bit still mystifies me, but... Exactly right on the competition, but traditional scout competitions revolve around scout skills (cooking, knots, etc), while this needs to revolve around Scout Values. There's lots of literature on good skills-competitions, let's build some on how to do Values competitions well!

First, THANK YOU for the cautionary tale! I suppose I should have solicited cautions, as well as ideas in my original post - I certainly do want to hear where people have experienced difficulties with trying to implement varieties of recognition schemes, and the variety of lopsided "foregone conclusion" outcome that you've just recounted is one of the many ways I've considered that a "physical rewards" system could go wrong. I figure for every one that I've thought of, there are probably a dozen that I haven't, so the more people thinking about the pitfalls and helping me to see them, the be

I really like this way of thinking of the process. It’s excellent shorthand for the mental model and process, and will really help with explaining it to people! I wonder if there’s a way to extend the idea into some kind of inter-patrol competition. Or maybe better, to do something simultaneously that functions as a “scout values” inter-patrol competition, so that you get the benefits of patrol -members working to support each-other to “win”. What I've been trying to come up with in the inter-patrol arena, are things like awarding ribbons to hang on their patrol flag for “good d

I'd like to analyze this a little more: I'm curious - does anyone else have the general feeling that this scenario would function as a reward more for the fireball/thanks giver, than the fireball/thanks recipient? I want to reward both/turn both into habits, so it's not a bad outcome, but somehow it feels differently focused than other "reward" methods we've tried. Will

I suppose it depends on what you mean by "learn". Youth definitely absorb a great many ideas and concepts through observation, but they're far better at learning "doing" by doing. This is why Scouting is activity-based, rather than lecture/presentation based. Habits, in particular, are learned by repetitive doing: No-one learns to play the piano well by observation, and likewise no-one learns to _habitually_ bend over and pick up litter, to habitually help beyond their own dishes with KP, or to habitually say "Thank You", by observation either. People learn to do these things habitual