Smile! You are under surveillance

Yesterday The Guardian reported on how "Nurses are to be scored on how compassionate they are towards patients as part of a government plan to improve quality in the NHS".

The current health secretary, Alan Johnson, "believes putting a smile on the face of nurses and encouraging empathetic care is as important to recovery as the skill of doctors in the operating theatre."

The initiative will take the form of a "compassion index".

It will be compiled by health regulators using surveys of patients' views while in hospital, including feedback about the attitude of staff.

I'm not convinced the NHS is the right place for tactics typically cynically exploited by retail outlets, airlines, hotels and call centres ('smiling down the phone' and telly ads).

See Nurses to be rated on how compassionate and smiley they are by John Carvel for more details.

Being made to smile at work: A new occupational hazard?

For hundreds of thousands of working people a well-honed smile is a critical part of their job description.

Almost every service business insists that its staff learn to smile broadly at all times.

For youngsters whose first jobs are typically with service sector employers, the first day of training is often spent developing the perfect, customer-luring smile.

The question is: has anyone ever considered that making smiling a part of the contract of employment could be damaging in someway?

Well, an article The Times this weekend considers just that.

It is put forward that complusory smiling at work can lead to:

- an inability for workers to turn false smiles off
- employees losing the ability to regulate their own emotions, leading to depression, mental illness and other disorders
- 'smile-mask syndrome': characterised by employee complaining of painful muscle and head-aches akin to repetitive strain injury.

See Smiling can seriously damage your health, by Leo Lewis, for an overview of this subject.