Hall, Sheri. 2005. Hospitals offer posh amenities. Detroit News. (January
2). Accessible at:
http://www.detnews.com/2005/health/0501/02/D01-47331.htm
If the above link is broken try:
http://tinyurl.com/5re9q
EXCERPT:
After giving birth at 6:30 p.m. on a recent Monday, Colleen Galla was
hungry.
But since Galla and her newborn daughter still hadn't received their room at
St. Joseph Mercy Oakland hospital, she didn't expect to get dinner. Galla
was surprised when a nurse brought her a full menu that included entrees
such as pan blackened red fish, an oriental chicken fruit salad plate and
garden vegetable burgers. Forty minutes later, she was dining on penne
pasta.
"I hadn't eaten all day, so that was really good," Galla said.
It's not quite the service you'd find at a Ritz-Carlton, but it's close --
and that's the goal. Under pressure to improve margins and boost patient
volumes, hospitals throughout Metro Detroit are offering hotel-like upscale
amenities such as Internet access, video games and call-ahead valet parking.
Even the term patient is being replaced by "guest," "customer" or "client."
Hospital executives say the key to thriving in an increasingly competitive
market lies not only in the medical treatment, but also in how they treat
patients.
"We already have a couple of strikes against us when people walk in the door
because obviously nobody is signing up to come here," said Jack Weiner,
chief executive of St. Joseph Mercy Oakland Hospital. "We take away people's
ability to control their lives. We take away their clothes and then people
they don't know are poking and prodding at them. So it's a matter of
treating people like human beings and allowing them to maintain their
lifestyle as much as possible."
Studies show patients who are calm, relaxed and happy recover more quickly,
Weiner added.
Customer satisfaction with hospitals increased 4.1 percent in the past year
to the industry's highest rating ever, according to an annual study by the
University of Michigan's Ross School of Business that surveys 800,000
consumers.
Besides hotel-like amenities, hospitals are making a bigger effort to
deliver services when patients need them -- not hours or days later.
The Detroit Medical Center and Oakwood Hospital guarantee to take care of
emergency room patients in 30 minutes or less. And Henry Ford Health System
and Oakwood offer same-day and next-day doctors' appointments for people who
feel ill.
Oakwood Healthcare in Dearborn has taken the concept one step further.
It hired consultants from Ritz-Carlton Hotels to help improve customer
service throughout its hospitals.
Since then, Oakwood has adopted a technique used by the posh hotel chain
that the hospital calls "the huddle." It operates like this: workers in
every department -- from the maintenance crew to the head nurse -- get
together for 10 minutes at the start of every shift to hear announcements,
talk about a weekly customer service standard and share personal news.
The theory is that if you take good care of your workers, they'll in turn
take good care of customers or patients, said Ken Trester, senior vice
president of marketing at Oakwood, who helped launch the initiative.
"Guest satisfaction is the end product, but you can't have that if your
employees aren't happy," he said. "We found that traditional customer
service training doesn't work well, because when workers got on the job they
became overwhelmed with their duties and lost focus. By talking about
customer service every day, we're making sure that doesn't happen."
So far, it's working. Surveys show that Oakwood patients are more satisfied
with the service they're getting.
"You work better when you feel you're working as a team and you know more
about your co-workers than just their names," said Carrie Cote, an assistant
nurse manager on an oncology floor who runs the meetings in her department.
Part of improving guest satisfaction is providing room service, which is now
offered at about a dozen hospitals in Metro Detroit. Previously, cooks made
meals using assembly-line techniques and delivered them at scheduled times
-- whether the patient was ready or not.
"Half of the people were eating the food hot and for the others, the trays
just sat there," Weiner said. "Then when the patient was finally ready to
eat, the hot beverage was cold, the cold beverage was warm and the Jell-O
was melting. We found we were throwing away a lot of food, and the patients
weren't happy."
Delivering freshly made meals is more expensive, and servers do a lot more
walking because they have to return to the same floor many times a day. And
the hospital had to hire workers to take orders via the phone and make sure
that patients on restricted diets weren't ordering foods they weren't
allowed to eat.
But the hospital is also saving money because it's not throwing away as much
food, Weiner said.
Jerome O'Conner, a patient in St. Joseph Mercy Oakland last week,
appreciated the service. During several days in the hospital with the flu,
he had ordered an oriental chicken salad fruit plate, macaroni and cheese,
meatloaf and the St. Joe's Juicy Burger.
"Most of it doesn't taste like sawdust," he said, "which is a vast
improvement."
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