QUALITY HEALTHCARE SERVICE with Kola Owolabi
Attainment of quality in any human endeavour is a gradual process everywhere. Nothing gets perfect overnight. Anything that is big is a sum of small, small things. The same way, good quality service is a sum of small steps or attempts of improvement over what was previously done.
One thing that helps one to take steps of improvement everytime is feedback. We are talking about feedback from patients or customers that you have had opportunity to serve before. What is feedback? I like best the definition provided by Britannica.com. It describes feedback as “helpful information or criticism that is given to someone to say what can be done to improve a performance, product, etc.”. So feedback is a reaction you get from others, particularly those who have patronized you before, that will motivate you to improve on what you are doing. It may be constructive or not constructive.
It may be nasty or friendly. Most of the time, it is the nasty feedback, the one that you feel very bad about that is the best in terms of ability to motivate one to get better. For example, most patients hate waiting for too long to see the physician who is supposed to attend to them. However, most of the time, people are too docile to complain right there. They are afraid that the doctor may get angry and no one wants to hurt the doctor who is supposed to help them get well. As they all keep quiet, the doctor continues with the same attitude and does not improve on his service. What most people do when they are tired of poor attention given by their doctor is to go somewhere else. They vote with their feet. At the end of the day, nobody has actually told the doctor what is bad about him. If more people come to him, due to his past glory he continues to dish out bad service. It is when he no longer has a flow of patronage as he used to have that he gets concerned.
At that time it may be too late to redeem the situation. In a setting like Nigeria, particularly in public medical institutions, where demand far outsrips supply, nobody knows if what he or she is doing, in terms of quality attention is bad, because the pressure of too many people waiting to be attended to, is overwhelming. So bad service is commonplace and people get away with it all the time.
Any practitioner who wants to stand out, must deliberately put structures in place to solicit and harvest feedback from patients on a real time basis, that is you give customers opportunity to freely express themselves on what they feel about the service that was meted out to them. It is better that the way and manner you put in place for them to register their feedback or their reaction is made confidential. Being confidential allows the customer to actually say exactly what he feels about the service that he was given. Most of us hate criticism and we have an initial disdain of criticism.
Criticism has been the tool that the IT world has used to record tremendous improvements over time and technology today has so much got advanced. The healthcare industry has been extremely slow in adopting criticism and every other form of feedback to-up its game in terms of good quality attention. Customers are supposed to know better because most people have patronized other practitioners in the same field and so have an idea of what good quality is supposed to be.
So when they don’t get it when they come to you, they are not happy. So if you have put in place a system that allows you to harvest feedback frequently from your customers, you are giving yourself the opportunity to incorporate quality standards of other practitioners that those people have come across and are suggesting that you adopt.
Kola Owolabi, 08023203198, is the Principal Consultant of Healing Balm Health Consult, a Healthcare Consultancy services organization involved in the training of healthcare practitioners, particularly on issues concerning putting in place quality improvement culture . To receive more information please text “SEND MORE INFO on your Healthcare Short Courses and Quality Service Improvement Programmes” by WhatsApp to 09077552781.