Cure is better than prevention

My mother used to say 'prevention is better than cure'. An apple a day keeps the doctor away. We even hear about how healthcare institutions implement wellness screening programs for exactly this reason.

The problem is that prevention is not better than cure. Prevention is most likely going to cost less than cure. It's most likely a time saving compared to cure. Prevention is undoubtedly preferable in many ways. But is it 'better'? I say not, thanks to the unfortunate affliction which we all suffer with - human nature.

Consider the current disaster in Turkey and Syria. Are the builders of buildings that withstood the earthquakes praised in the media? No, the builders of buildings that fell down are persecuted. The volunteers aiding the rescue operation are praised for saving lives. The people who evacuated buildings early, the people who took early action are forgotten.

Don't get me wrong, the people who are risking their own lives to help others deserve praise and recognition. The point I'm making, if it's not already clear, is that we all have the potential to save lives but not in a way that anyone notices.

One thing that I have often noticed in organisational cultures is the presence of firestarters, people who have been praised in the past for swinging into action at a moment of crisis and saving the day. Customer complaint emergency? Make way! Coffee machine out of sugar? Stand aside, hero coming through!

If you've worked with someone like this then you'll know that their compulsion to be the saviour is so strong that if there isn't a disaster on hand, they'll create one.

We've seen it with politicians too, creating a crisis or at least pouring fuel on a glowing ember to create an opportunity to show how marvellous they are.

During the COVID pandemic, the scientists who advocated prevention through social distancing and sensible infection control measures were ridiculed and attacked. The scientists who created vaccines received OBEs and other honours. They saved us! No, they only saved us once we were infected. Consider all of the people who saved us without us even knowing that we were being saved.

When I was a young engineer, one of the jobs that got dumped on me was preventative maintenance. I would be given a stack of pink cards with details of various installations and I would work my way through them, topping up lead acid batteries, testing fire alarms, replacing ink ribbons, oiling clocks and so on. It was a thankless task, hence it got dumped onto me, the the apprentice. Nobody else wanted to do it, and as long as there was someone less important to delegate to, they didn't have to. Now, nearly 40 years later, I am totally sold on the idea of preventative maintenance. Sure, I get to look like a DIY hero for unblocking the drain or changing the lightbulb but I save myself a lot of time, effort and money by fixing problems before they happen. I don't get any thanks for it, but it keeps me busy. After all, who can say what would have happened?

On one maintenance visit, I had to test the fire alarm at a bakery in Wednesbury. It's not there any more, sadly. The fire alarm had a standby power supply, a bank of lead acid batteries, like car batteries, and the lazy way to test the alarm was simply to put a special plug into a break glass point to simulate someone breaking the glass. If the alarm rings, all is good. But if there's a point at the other end of the factory, and it's nearly break time, and if there's a bell in a remote security hut and it's raining then it's probably OK. Nothing bad will happen. Nobody will ever find out.

I'd like to say that at the age of 18, I was a super diligent and careful apprentice. This wasn't quite true. I just had a lot of time on my hands. The longer I could make the maintenance visit last, the more time I could hide away from the prying eyes of managers. Maybe there was a bit of diligence involved.

In the event of a fire, the power to the building will usually be shut off so the fire alarm has to operate on battery power. People's lives are at stake, especially in a bakery with combustible flour in the air which can cause dramatic explosions, so the alarm needs to work for a long time on battery power, which is why they had such big batteries. The batteries were encased in glass and the constant charging would cause the acid inside to evaporate which is why they needed regularly topping up with water.

In the bakery, the batteries were high up on a shelf. At some point in time, a nice little office had been built underneath, so now the batteries were inside the ceiling of an office that was only accessible with significant difficulty. Suffice to say, the local maintenance engineer had never been up there. Most likely, never since the alarm was first installed, anything between 10 and 20 years before.

I borrowed a step ladder and moved the ceiling tiles, clambering up into the dusty darkness. Finding the power supply to the alarm panel, I disconnected it, climbed back down and tested the alarm.

Ding.

That was all that the batteries could muster. One faint, pathetic, useless ding.

I climbed back up into the roof void. The batteries were, of course, dry. Not a drop of water in them. The lead electrodes inside were nothing more than a clump of oxide.

I filled out the pink card with all of this information and sent it back into the office. Looking back, I could have had a quiet word with the maintenance engineer responsible but I felt angry that he, through sheer laziness, had endangered people's lives. I suppose, looking back more carefully, that I also wanted some credit for finding the problem and saving the day.

Shortly after, I was summoned to site. The maintenance engineer was there, plus our boss, plus another engineer with a new set of batteries which were fitted quietly and secretly, the cost being hidden in a job somewhere else. The pink card disappeared. I was told that I had done the right thing. Everyone put the matter behind them with reputation intact. The year was 1988. The bakery business was acquired by a competitor and the bakery closed down in 1989. There was never a fire. I saved no-one.

And thus I return to my opening statement, that prevention might be preferable to cure in many ways but is it better? Not if praise and recognition are what you're seeking. Not if you're human. And so we will continue to lurch from one calamity to the next, eagerly awaiting our next hero.