Why I Am Writing These Pages

My son built this page for me, and asked me to write.

I have never been a man of many words on paper. For most of my working life, the writing I did was procedures, policies and job descriptions — the documents that tell a hospital how its work should be done. They were not meant to be read for pleasure. They were meant to be followed.

But I have spent close to forty years inside hospitals, and a career that long leaves you with more than a record of titles and dates. It leaves you with things you have learned — about systems, about people, and about the difference between a place that truly runs and a place that only appears to. I would like to set some of that down, while I still remember it clearly, for my children and for anyone who finds it useful.

So this is what these pages are. Not a memoir — a few reflections, written slowly, from a long career in the parts of the hospital that patients rarely see: the maintenance, the supply, the housekeeping, the security, and the offices where the schedules and the budgets are made.

If you have come here looking for my professional history, it is all on this site, set out plainly. But if you have a little more time, return now and then. I will try to write honestly, and to write only what I actually know.

— Ibrahim