Evaluation of the quality of customer service at the Modern Hospital
Health care is one of the most important services to human beings (Gupta, 2016). The services help promote and sustain health by managing diseases, reducing infections and disabilities and event prevent premature death. As such, health care facilities must offer excellent services, including customer care services. Efficient customer care services are particularly crucial for guiding the patient through treatment, responding to concerns, informing and reassuring patients that their illness is being handled by qualified staff. Due to the importance of medical services, most patients are forced to assess potential hospital before visiting the facility, especially if the medical need is not an emergency. Recently, I was considering visiting the Modern Hospital, one of my local hospitals, for a general health checkup. From the evaluation of the local health care facility, the services offered do not meet the qualities of an efficient customer care services. The facility provides poor reception, inadequate communication, and fails to be transparent.
One would expect that the hospital reception welcomes new patients into the facility and guide him or her step-by-step guidance on how to manoeuvre through the hospital when seeking various services. The local hospital receptionists fail to meet these expectations. When a patient enters the hospital premises, the receptionist records a few personal details about the patient and leaves him or her to find their own directions in the vast facility. As a result, most patients who visit the hospital end up feeling lost, especially if it is their first time in the hospital.
Another excellent quality of customer service in a hospital is a superb ability to keep records (Khalid et al., 2017). My local hospital has an inferior record-keeping ability if at all, it has any. All patients are required to fill several forms every time they visit the hospital. The receptionist insists on taking new details of personal identity, insurance details and demographic data. The tedious requirement forces patients to line up for service, which ends up wasting a lot of valuable time.
A good hospital should have a functional and elaborate communication system connecting its staff and customers. My local hospital mostly fails to establish excellent telephone communication with its customers. The facility has a functional office telephone; calls from customers are hardly answered. In ten attempts to call the hospital, only one could be answered. Consequently, it is very difficult to communicate with staff at the facility as a customer even when experiences a medical emergency. Although the office telephone is operational, the inability to receive calls renders it almost useless and the patients are large in touch with the hospital staff.
Good customer service demands that a hospital has at least one communication channel through which customers can be promptly listened and responded to. When the facility does not prefer communicating through the phone, it should have an efficient mail service where customers can convey their needs and receive immediate response. The local hospital does not respond to a lot of mails sent to its mailbox. Even the ones that are responded to, the feedback come long after the initial mail. Such feedback may no longer be relevant at the time it is issued.
In matters of actual health care, effective medical staff would brief the customers on what to expect about their treatment. For instance, cancer patients who require surgical treatment based on the doctor’s assessment should be prepared psychologically for the therapy. The local hospital fails in providing efficient psychological services. The facility offers counselling services, but patients rarely see the hospital physiatrists. In most cases, the psychiatrists are either absent or busy. As a result, most patients are forced to undergo even the most serious treatments without the input of the psychologist.
One would also expect that a good hospital takes into account the customer feedback when making changes in service delivery at the health care facility. The local hospital does not seem to base their improvements on customer feedback. Two years ago, most patients complained about the inefficiencies at the facility that resulted from manual handling of patient information. Particularly, Patients were opposed to the requirements of filling several forms every time they visited the hospital. Some of the patients even proposed migration to the electronic health system (HER) that would accelerate storage and retrieval of patient records. However, the hospital is still using the traditional methods of handling information that requires a lot of paper work.
A good hospital should be highly transparent to its patient. Such transparency is met through publishing important information such as services available, profile of their medical staff and the hours that various services are available. It should also issue detailed information on how pricing for the services are done. My local hospital lacks transparency to its customers. First information about its staff is not available to the public even in its website. Many patients who visit the facility are also unable to comprehend how pricing is done for the services. Finally, the hospital does not inform patients when services such as counseling are available.
In brief, I would not prefer going to my local hospital for general checkup. Modern Hospital fails to give excellent customer care services to its patients for several reasons. First, it fails keep patient records conveniently thereby subjecting patients to tedious process every time they visit for service. Secondly, the customer does not offer a stable communication channel either by telephone or email. Thirdly, psychiatrist services are not always available even when they very necessary. Finally, the hospital fails to be transparent.
Reference
Gupta, K. S., & Rokade, V. (2016). Importance of quality in health care sector: A review. Journal of Health Management, 18(1), 84-94.
Khalid, M., Afzaal, H., Hassan, S., & Zafar, N. A. (2017). Analysis and Formal Model of RFID-Based Patient Registration System. International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, 8(11), 492-498.