QUALITY HEALTHCARE SERVICE with Kola Owolabi
It is said in the Bible that there is no new thing under heaven. Whatever you want to do, somebody has done it before. What a wise person needs to do is to lookout for whoever has done what you want to do, study how he did it and you can achieve exactly the same result, and even outshine the person you copied from because you have the advantage of adding your own perspective to improve on what was available before.
The same applies to quality healthcare service. We have good references of those who have the quality standard you are hoping to attain one day. Such people may be even within your own environment. If they are not available around you, you can extend your search to even outside your country and as you start looking at what others have achieved, you set the pace for an unending quality improvement journey.
Even if you have everybody to copy, what should set the pace for your quality improvement journey is feedback from your own customers or patients. Why is this the best way? It will help you grow your quality to the taste of the customers or patients that you currently serve.
Most of your patients or customers have seen and patronized other healthcare providers and so are able to benchmark properly in terms of quality expectations. So whatever advice they give is based on their exposure to different quality service offerings.
In essence they are helping you adopt superior quality standards without you going out of your way to understudy others. It translates to the fact that if they give you advice on the quality standard of your establishment and you yield to what they told you, it will help motivate them to continue to patronize you because they will have noticed that you are applying what they told you.
It will not only motivate them to patronize you more, they will also be more disposed to recommending your establishment to other people, because they will see that you are listening to them.
So how do you go about collecting this critical feedback from your patients or customers? You must do it in a structured way. The first way is to incorporate your feedback harvesting mechanism into your service delivery system. How do you do this? At each point of service in your establishment, there is a form you have to give to each patient. It can be in hardcopy format or digital that is forwarded to their WhatsApp or Phone SMS. The response should be configured in open-ended format like Yes or No or I don’t know. This will enable them to quickly complete it and return to you. The second way to do it is to administer it after the patient has been attended to. The feedback form should them be sent digitally to the patient. This will be a more reliable guide in the sense that it ensures confidentiality and so the patient is likely to open up more. Your feedback form needs to be appropriately structured so that the people will give you relevant and usable feedback.
One other thing about the feedback arrangement is how to use the feedback harvested to be of immense benefit to you in your quality improvement journey. We shall look at this in the next post.
Kola Owolabi (08023203198) is Fellow of the Institute of Management Consultants (with certifications in Healthcare Organizations Operations and Qualify Improvement in Healthcare Organizations)
To receive more information please text “SEND MORE INFO on your Healthcare Short Courses and Quality Service Improvement Programmes” by WhatsApp to 09031911326.