Guest Post by Kristin Baird

Reputations are based on word of mouth. No amount of advertising will build the type of trust that you want from patients, their families and ultimately the community that you serve. You have to earn it. And you will only earn it through consistently positive experiences. No matter how much quality data we publish, people will gauge quality through their personal experiences. Consumers expect clinical competence but make decisions based on how the encounter made them feel. That means that even one disengaged employee can leave a patient and their family feeling nervous, insulted and on edge about the care.

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Take my uncle Don’s experience for example. Last week he was hospitalized with a severe infection in one of his vertebrae requiring six weeks of inpatient care for round-the-clock intravenous antibiotics. Don is a fairly stoic man who is no stranger to physical work. But by the time he was admitted he was in such intense pain he could not walk and had to be wheeled to his room. A nurse admitted him to his room and dropped off some personal supplies. She said, “Here’s a urinal and wash basin. I couldn’t find one of those things that you puke in, so if you feel sick I guess you’ll have to use this,” she said holding up his wash basin. She turned on her heel and headed for the door.

Don spoke up and told her that he needed to go to the bathroom. She turned back and said, “What do you want me to do about it?” She pointed at the supplies she had delivered and said, “There’s the urinal and there’s the bathroom. You walked in here on your own, I’m sure you can manage,” and out she went. My aunt Joan was left to help him. She later called me in tears. As the “family nurse” it’s not uncommon for me to get calls from my parents, siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins requesting my input on their choices of hospitals, physicians and treatment regimens.

Joan had to drive 90 minutes each way to the hospital to which Don was admitted and wanted to have him transferred to a hospital closer to her home. She gave me the names of two hospitals within ten miles of her home. I talked to her about what was most important to her and then introduced her to the hospitalcompare.hhs.gov website. I talked her through how to compare the three hospitals based on the published data. We noted that the two hospitals closest to their home had the lowest scores for clinical quality and patient satisfaction. The one where he was currently an inpatient had the highest all around scores.

Ultimately, she decided to move him to the one closest to home insisting that the data just couldn’t be right. Her good friends had been patients locally and told her that they had gotten excellent care at the local hospital. And besides, she had witnessed first-hand how the staff treated Don in the high-scoring hospital. This was all she needed to know about quality. Her experience was her reality and there could be no arguing about that.

It comes down to this; seeing is believing, but feeling is the truth. Each patient’s experiences become his reality. Health care leaders who want to protect their organization’s reputation and instill trust among their patients, must continually strive to create consistently positive patient experiences. They need to set the same high expectations for service as they do for compliance with clinical protocols. A competent leader wouldn’t dream of letting clinical practices slide because someone is having a bad day. And yet, he may tolerate the poor or marginal service behaviors among his staff, underestimating the power that they have to destroy the organization’s reputation in as little as a thirty second encounter.

Fostering a culture of service excellence is achievable. But it can only happen when leaders set clear priorities, hire, develop and recognize the right people, support them with effective and efficient processes and assist each individual in developing a strong sense of purpose. Then and only then will they be able to raise the bar on service excellence.

Kristin Baird, RN, BSN, MHA is the author of Raising the Bar on Service Excellence (2008) and is president of Baird Consulting, Inc., a firm which specializes in results-oriented customer service solutions for health care organizations. She can be reached at kris@baird-consulting.com