incentives

One of the companies I interviewed with has a policy listed among the many "healthy living" corporate bragging points, that each employee is eligible for a certain number of days of flexible leave time that need not be scheduled in advance. This time can be used when one is ill, or to care for a sick family member, to deal with a personal emergency, or when bad weather makes it unsafe to come to work. An employee who does not use any of this leave time in a calender year receives a bonus the following January. One who uses only one day receives a smaller bonus. It's hardly "healthy living" to bribe sick people to come to work and cough on everybody else.

I thought about incentive structures yesterday, while I was listening to a quality improvement seminar. The speaker was a consultant who had worked on improving hand-washing in one of the Boston hospitals. His initial measurements of hand-washing rates were disturbingly low, and a lot of health care workers said they did not have time to wash more often. (All their incentives pushed them to see more patients, or to spend more time with patients, and it was surprisingly hard for them to go against that.) The speaker said they changed the bonus rules so a department only got bonuses if they met their target for hand hygiene improvement, and it turned out to help a lot. It was a fairly short seminar, and he didn't go into mechanisms, but I suspect one reason might have been that it made it easier to push back against the established incentive structure without needing to shift to another level of abstraction or idealism. The decision point is whether to hurry into the room and treat the next patient right now, or take 30 seconds to wash hands first. Hurrying into the room means coming closer to the day's schedule targets, not getting yelled at, coming closer to a bonus...it's immediate and tangible. Taking the time to wash hands means some patients are less likely to get sick, but nobody knows who or when.

sunscreen

I realize that sunscreen is supposed to coat the skin. That's the point, that's how it blocks UV light. It still feels icky. I've found sunscreen without migraine-triggering perfume. I've found sunscreen advertised as "light" or "non-sticky" or "non-oily." It still feels filthy on my skin, like makeup. I put it on before going out in the sun, because my skin sunburns so easily...but it feels distracting the whole time I'm out, and I wash it off as soon as I can. I don't sunbathe, or spend a lot of time outside in minimalist clothes...but I do like to wear elbow-length sleeves. And sandals. And of course there's my face and the back of my neck, so I have an ongoing need for sunscreen.

So many people seem to put sunscreen on and honestly forget about it, as if they can't feel it at all. I think they must have entirely different skin. I'd like advice from the people who can usually feel sunscreen (or makeup, or moisturizer, or whatever) coating their skin. Is there some low-fragrance or unscented sunscreen that feels like it has relatively little of that coating effect?