Its fun to be arrogant. Nothing is easier than saying you are better than someone else, and laughing at them when they’re trying to improve. “We don’t need to do that, we already know what we’re doing, hah,hah”. You know what’s funny, reality couldn’t care less if you think you’re great, it only cares if you are great. The ischemic heart muscle downstream from a new coronary occlusion doesn’t care if you say you don’t need to practice ACLS and EKG interpretation because you know that stuff cold and the other organization that trains everyday is just dumb. It only cares if you know what you’re doing. The child stuck in the back bedroom of a house on fire doesn’t care if you think your department is awesome because it has cool new trucks, he only cares if you know how to use those trucks to save his life. The person who’s spleen is shattered doesn’t care if you’re ranked #1 by a magazine, that person only cares if you’re ED knows when to activate the trauma team, that your trauma team knows how to figure out you’re dying, and that you have an immediately available OR and a team that knows how to use it.
How do you know you’re really great? Quantitative data, not qualitative data. What people “think” is only important in customer relations, not patient care. What matters in patient care is your response time, your staffing, your ability to perform tasks right the first time, your mortality rate, and your complication rate among other things. Is quantitative data always right? Nope, but it’s more likely to reflect your true performance than your opinion of yourself.
If your organization denigrates real data or refuses to measure themselves against others, chances are you will never improve, and very likely will get worse. If your organization values data, posts rates of infections and such in the hallways, encourages and congratulates people for getting additional training, uses up their down time with training and practice, examines everything you do and provides information that helps you get better, you’re in the right place. If not, and you don’t see any likelihood of change, work somewhere else.