A new Slop University research poster catalogues every leaflet in 61 waiting-room racks across 34 suburban medical centres, finding 23.9 per cent of titles fail at least one currency test while all 61 racks were fully stocked on all three visits.
A census of 4,912 leaflets across 34 suburban medical centres finds closed services and disconnected numbers still on the rack, and every rack fully stocked at every visit
Three times over twelve weeks, researchers counted every leaflet in sixty-one waiting-room racks, rang the number printed on each title, and checked whether the address behind it still existed.
A research poster released today by the School of Emergent Priorities reports what came back. Of 268 distinct titles catalogued across 34 suburban medical centres, 64 failed at least one currency test: the service closed, the number disconnected, the programme renamed, the eligibility superseded, or the address moved. Those titles accounted for 1,118 of the 4,912 leaflets counted. The median one had been out of date for nineteen months, and a single closed-service leaflet had sat in its pocket for eight years. Every one of the 61 racks was fully stocked at every visit.
A full rack is the easiest thing in the building to check, and it is the one thing we checked that told us least. What we cannot yet say is how a service would find out, if nobody walked in and rang the numbers.
— Dr Runa Adegoke, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Strategic Drift Survey
The poster also sets centres reporting against a restocking target beside those without one, and finds no difference in what the racks hold. Dr Marek Solheim, Lecturer in the School, said the pattern sat squarely within the School’s interest in what an organisation keeps after it has stopped doing it. “Nothing on that rack was ever retired,” he said. “It was simply not reprinted.”
The University is pleased to see the School’s anticipatory-capability agenda reach into the ordinary furniture of a waiting room, where a printed programme and the service behind it can drift apart unremarked.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.makg60.