Customer/patient dilemma key to effective training
Customer/patient dilemma key to effective training
Employees don't always have needed skills
Health care organizations hold employees accountable for a skill - customer service excellence - in which they have never been formally trained, according to a recent report released by Press, Ganey Associates, the South Bend, IN-based patient satisfaction measurement firm.
The report also contends that one of the essential challenges of all health care training is developing a meaningful answer to this question: "Are they patients or are they customers?"
Managers should develop formal training - in much the same way they teach clinical courses such as advanced cardiac life support - to make sure the entire staff can deal with the customer service quandary in a practical fashion, say Thom A. Mayer, MD, and Robert J. Cates, MD, chairman and vice chairman, respectively, of the department of emergency medicine at Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, VA.
People have different perceptions
But before a customer service training effort can be successful, health care staff first must realize each person has his or her own definition of what constitutes a customer vs. a patient, Mayer and Cates say.
Health care professionals in general have a high degree of clarity on how to take care of patients, many of whom are desperately ill and require timely and orderly interventions, the report states. Customers, on the other hand, are perceived as more independent, with far more control of the health care inter action than patients, a fact many health care workers tacitly resent, Mayer and Cates contend.
If patient-customer "autopsies" could be performed at bedside, they add, staff would find that inside each person is both a patient and a customer, to varying degrees.
"This is not a transition from patient to customer, which is often viewed as insulting or demeaning to health care professionals," Mayer concludes. Instead it is a recognition that the patients and customers are always both, if health care workers can only put our diagnostic skills to work to figure it out. Health care organizations must help their staff understand this dynamic. Then they have a substantial foundation for an excellent customer service program. Without it, the pragmatic side of customer service is difficult to enact."
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