JONAH.

A word feared by many. Ask any doctor or nurse and most of them have storiesssss to tell.

Jonah is described as a jinx at work in the field of medicine. If you are “Jonah”, the workload at your shift is perceivably higher, or severity of cases tend to be worse than your colleagues’ calls.

It may be measured in terms of
-admission rates
-number of patients deteriorating: eg a patient who’s stable develop asystole after your shift started
-number of pending emergency OT cases: eg none the previous day vs 10 appendicitis during your surgical call.
-complexity of case

Jonah is different from “busy” in the sense that if the ward has always have 20 admissions a day & it’s the same for you, it’s called the usual busyness.

Jonah is when everyone’s call have 20 admissions & you’re having 40, & this pattern persist whenever you’re oncall.

Jonah can be divided into

1. Modifiable risk factor: may be related to color (esp bright colors like red or orange) or type of clothes (experience varies for everyone)

2. Non-modifiable risk factor: innate nature; whatever you wear/do/say is irrelevant; it runs in your blood and you’re fated to burn down the ward.

Some medical workers believe in “Jonah”, and some do not.

Almost everyone start off their career as a non-believer. “Nonsense”, “superstitious”, “bullshit” are the usual reply.

And when it happens, the rest are history.

For those who do, their behaviours change:

- Verbal: wishing someone “have a cool night shift”, avoid saying or asking certain questions like “why is the ward so empty?”.

Non-verbal:

Avoid wearing red or bright color clothes, or avoid wearing certain scrub/tudung or even underwear which they deemed as “Jonah-inducing”;

Some of them go as far as swapping shift with colleagues to avoid working with certain MOs who are “Jonah”;

Having said these, someone’s jonahness may comes in handy: their logbook for procedures tend to be completed much sooner than others.

There’s a randomised control study done in Sarawak to investigate on jonah-ness, titled “Does Red Clothes Lead to a ‘Hot’ Surgical call?”;

The poster was presented in the 22nd Asian Congress of Surgery in August 2019 and caught everyone’s attention.

It concluded that wearing red color clothes neither influences the amount or severity of workload nor it leads to negative patient outcomes.

Do you believe in “jonah”?

Not a proven method and not evidence-based so try at your own risk