Stop Blocking YouTube....Please
Today I was trying to help a physician find a video of a beating heart. Downloading videos is hit or miss around here. Sometimes it is allowed and sometimes (usually when you really need it) it is blocked. One day you might not be able to download a video from Google Video, the next day you can download it. Who knows why the blocking is sporadic, I have given up trying to find a pattern.
I guess I should count myself lucky, because today we could download videos. Unfortunately, we couldn't download anything from YouTube. Even on days the best of days, YouTube is stritctly verboten. The doctor did not want a surgical video, he wanted something very simple. There was a lot of nice quality videos on Google Video, but the ones we found did not fit his needs. It turns out there also appeared to be some nice videos on YouTube, but I couldn't tell you about them and whether they fit his needs because they were blocked.
So this is my plea to hospital IT departments....
Please stop blocking YouTube you are only hurting your doctors, nurses, and other employees from finding and using quality medical or consumer health videos. Trust us when we say that we really don't want to see how horribly Brittney Spears performed at the VMAs.
6 Comments:
Check online for public proxies (Google for them or whatever) that you can access from work. There are settings in your web browser that will tell it to connect to a proxy server when you start it. If you can access the proxy server, than you can go anywhere from there, including YouTube, even if your IT department has it blocked Public proxies come and go on an almost daily basis, so from a practical standpoint they can't block all those :)
Although I actually did want to see how poorly Britney Spears' performance was, I did that from home. It is a shame that hospital IT continues to block sites like YouTube (also forbidden at my institution). I understand that bandwidth usage is an issue and that there are people who are going to use YouTube for non-work related purposes. However, I honestly believe that by blocking access to sites like YouTube (or the whole internet, which actually happens here) IT is doing a great diservice to every patient who comes in contact with hospital staff. You never know when an online service will provide an answer that may save a life, or prevent an adverse event.
Great post! My thoughts here
I like the idea about using a public proxy to get to YouTube and other blocked sites, but our IT people are ahead of me. I searched "public proxies" in Google and got a list. Every item on the list that contains links to proxies is blocked. How could I possibly find a public proxy that isn't blocked yet? And if I found a proxy today, it would be blocked tomorrow. It's thankless.
Of course this plea assumes that a hospital's IT department actually cares about patients. In this neck of the woods the only thing the IT department can do is call in actual experts to solve the technical problems OR spend time to gum up the works (since they don't know what they are doing) and THEN call in the experts. Sad.
I do not know which websites are blocked in our University Hospitals (I'm working in the academic medical library on another network) but they sure have an open policy for their staff. Their intranet is a wiki (editing is possible for staff on all levels - but on the background there is a editing board for control) and they managed to offer our library toolbar to their personnel (but not in a classical way - they have special instructions to install the toolbar, explained on their intranet). Nice, isn't it?
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