Customer
Service in Healthcare – A Nice Idea
In the summer of 1977, I was
31 years old and working at The Shadyside Hospital of Pittsburgh. As I recall, my title was third assistant
to the eighteenth vice president.
It was a beautiful summer Sunday
morning, and I was driving home from an errand in downtown Pittsburgh. I stopped at a McDonald’s and purchased a cup
of coffee. I might point that today at
age 74 that cup of coffee would be free.
So, I was driving home in
light traffic and started to feel less than ideal. I could feel my blood pressure rising, my face
turned red, my heart was racing, there was a tingling in my extremities, and I
was undergoing an unexplainable sense of dread.
By the time I arrived home I thought I was dying. I asked my wife to call 911 and an ambulance
showed up, packed me up liked a sardine and took me to the local community
hospital.
Upon arrival I was given
expedited treatment. My clothes were
taken from me, and I was given a blue pastel robe open in the back for the
world to view my more natural look. The
emergency room physician ordered my blood pressure, and it was recorded at 210
over 110, an EKG was administered, blood work was taken, and the ER physician performed
a physical examination. All the
tests came out fine.
The emergency physician
marched to the beat of a different drummer.
He had so many gold chains around his neck I was fearful that if he bent
over, he might snap his neck. He had a
large gold ring on each finger except for his thumbs. He had long jet-black hair brushed back and
held in place with hairspray. It
appeared he needed an entire can of hairspray to hold back that much hair. I was fearful that someone might light a
match near his head, and we will all go up in a puff of smoke.
The physician could not hide
his contempt for me. He thought I had a
“panic attack” occasioned by some underlying emotional problem. Here is what he said to me. “Young man, you have to get your emotions
under control.” As a practical matter,
what does that mean? The Beatles flew to
Northern India and sought the advice of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Rishikesh,
India. Should I have booked a flight
to India and found myself a Hindi spiritual advisor? I do not think so.
Back to the hospital. Attitude and opinions are like the common
cold, they are contagious. When the rest
of the emergency room staff detected the contempt of the emergency room
physician for me, they caught the fever.
A nurse threw my clothes at me and asked for the robe back. I will never forget the written discharge
instructions, “Get your emotions under control.” This was by the way, was all wrong.
What the emergency room
physician should have concluded is we are not certain what is going on with you
and you should see your primary care physician and get this all sorted
out.
Well, that is what I did, I
saw my primary physician and he ran an alternate set of tests and determined
that I had an exceedingly rare idiosyncratic allergy to coffee. In the years since I have been incredibly
careful to avoid coffee.
Notwithstanding, there have been several episodes when I ordered decaffeinated
coffee in a restaurant, and I have mistakenly been given caffeinated
coffee. It is always a real mess. I get a blood pressure spikes, my heart
starts racing and all the other symptoms I described earlier. It takes me about 24 hours to sleep it
off.
So, what do we learn from my
experience? For me it would be something
like this. First, there was an absence
of professionalism. Professionalism is the
skill, good judgment, and polite behavior that is expected from a person who is
trained to do a job well. Professionalism' is commonly understood as an
individual's adherence to a set of standards, code of conduct or collection of
qualities that characterize accepted practice within a given profession.
I do not think the emergency
room physician deported himself in a professional manner. He looked more like a Las Vegas Hustler. He was not polite. Last, he made a clinical conclusion and
offered discharge instructions that the prudent man could not comply with.
An understatement might be
that my customer expectations were not met.
There is a simpler definition of professionalism, and it has to do with
self-control or self-regulation. Do you
treat people the way you want to be treated?
It is not that complicated. Over
the course of my career, I asked hundreds of physicians, nurses, pharmacists,
and other healthcare professionals what their understand of professionalism
is. Often, they simply do not have a
working definition or personal philosophy.
Therein lies the
solution. The Medial Schools and
Bio-Medical Sciences training programs need to emphasize in their curriculum
the importance of professionalism.
I do not exclude healthcare
administration from this suggestion. I
personally know several health system CEO that have read their press clippings
once too often and behave like barbarians.
Humbly submitted,
Jan Ricks Jennings, MHA,
LFACHE
JanJenningsBlog.Blogspot.com
412.913.0636 Cell
724.733.0509 Office
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