This post links the process of refactoring from the world of IT and relates it to the healthcare setting. Consider all the policies, guidelines, and observations you have to manage in your daily clinical practice. Then add the risk screening, safety checklists, and tick box exercises to your workload. These elements make up much of electronic medical record (EMR) or electronic health record (EHR) a time-consuming task for health professionals. Think of care as simply broken down into direct or non-direct activities. You will spend more and more time on the documentation than on actual care giving. Which sorts of defeats the purpose of the ‘safety’ approach.

In IT, refactoring is the process of improving the internal structure of existing code without changing its external behavior or functionality. The goal is to make the code cleaner and more efficient. It’s also to ensure it is easier to read and maintain, while still performing the same tasks as before.

Common reasons for refactoring include:

• Reducing code complexity
• Removing redundancy or duplication
• Improving readability and consistency
• Enhancing performance or scalability

This recent post on ‘safety clutter’ exemplifies this problem: Nursing Education Network. (2025). Are we auditing for improvement, or auditing for auditing’s sake?

Refactoring

Jeremie Harris is the CEO and Edouard Harris the CTO of Gladstone AI, a company dedicated to promoting the responsible development and adoption of artificial intelligence. Either listen to the whole talk or scroll through towards the end to the 2:35:50 mark and listen about refactoring in IT development.

This video from way back in 1991 shows Australian business tycoon Kerry Packer. He discusses the passing of new laws without repealing the old ones. This exemplifies the importance of refactoring in government.

Note: Please focus on refactoring and any relationship to healthcare in these videos, this post has nothing to do with politics.