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Nudge is such a complex word. An oxymoron almost by my definition. Officially though, what is a nudge?

nudge1 /nʌdʒ/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[nuhj] -nudged, nudg·ing, noun
–verb (used with object)

1.	to push slightly or gently, esp. with the elbow, to get someone’s attention, prod someone into action, etc.

“Push slightly” but get “attention” and “action.” Nudging a heavy rock on a cliff is all it takes to get it to topple. I nudge a friend in the side and they will jerk, and maybe hit back! In essence, a nudge is a little action that makes a lot happen and that is the point of this great New York Times article(if it asks for login go here). It tells the story of a San Francisco hospital that instituted a rule that all beds must be propped up no matter what, unless under different doctors orders.

For more than a decade, it turns out, medical researchers have known that people on ventilators should generally have their heads elevated. When the patients are lying down, bacteria can easily travel from the stomach, up to the mouth and breathing tube, and ultimately into the lungs, causing pneumonia. When people are propped up, gravity becomes their ally.

But hospitals have had a hard time translating this scientific knowledge into better medical care. Patients frequently need to be put on their backs, to be bathed or to receive treatment, and once they are lying down, doctors and nurses — busy worrying about dozens of other things — don’t always remember to move the bed back up.

“When you have to rely on someone to do it, it’s not going to happen every time,” said Dr. Michael Gropper, the director of critical care medicine at UCSF Medical Center, the hospital I was visiting.

So Dr. Gropper made a new rule. Unless there was a written order from a doctor saying that a patient should be lying down, every patient on a ventilator had to be sitting up.

How much of an impact did this simple rule have?

[T]he incidence of ventilator-associated pneumonia has fallen more than 40 percent since 2005. There are people walking around Northern California this morning who otherwise would not be alive.

Many times people know the right thing to do, but continue to do the wrong thing since that is the status quo. Although changing behavior may seem like a lot of work, many times just inputting a small rule, a “nudge”, is enough, making the default action always or mostly right. The article mentions another example, buying smaller portions, as a way to counter act our extra-large culture and applies the “nudge rule” to various other problems.

A small decision can make a huge difference, in the case of the hospital it saved lives. Are there any areas of your life where you can add a nudge and get big results?

Source LifeHacker
Photo Ypsilanti
Definition Dictionary.com