Tag Archives: hospital

Sometimes Life Gives You Bitter Lemons

Healthcare, Uncategorized, , , ,

A month or so ago, I fell on bad health times. My kidneys collapsed, and I ended up in the hospital. And then I had to start dialysis. To sum it up, it really sucked. And still does.

Now, I have to go through dialysis every other day, and let’s just say that those sessions of three or four hours a day are pretty awful. I wouldn’t wish this on people I don’t like (even if there were people I didn’t like).

But slowly, I feel a bit better, although I suspect that I’m never going to be 100 percent back up to speed. Some days, I’m just completely exhausted and there’s really no way around it.

I’m lucky that I’m able to continue working, although it is a bit difficult some days. But I try not to let others know how much pain I’m in whenever I am in pain, and that keeps people from inquiring too much.

Anyway, I know it’s been a while since I shared any information, so I thought I would do so, although I don’t usually share bad information. I thought this one time I’d do so because it’s so hard to bounce back to normal under the circumstances.

The Underlying Problem of Giving Them the Pickle

Business, Education, Healthcare, , , , , , , , ,

Pickle

Just recently, I was working for a health care organization that seemed to be having some difficulty in customer service. As a result, the higher-ups thought it would be really beneficial if the education department (of which I was a part) took up the task of teaching customer service to the front line employees, specifically the people who engage patients when they come to the hospital system. So, after a few meetings that consisted of management explaining how customer service needs to improve (in which I was reminded of the infamous pro dominant adage of “We will beat our slaves until moral improves” but I digress), we were then shown a motivational film that’s been making the circuit called “Give Them the Pickle.” In case you’re not familiar with this film, it features the creator of the ice cream parlor Farrell’s as he explains how a customer got really upset in one of his establishments because he asked for an extra pickle and was then told that pickles are extra, or something like that. This started a whole series of adventures where this owner decided to change the customer service model of his franchise forever. There may have been an “and they lived happily ever after” at the end of it as well. I’ll admit, it was motivational and it was a good presentation. But it seemed to miss a few things, specifically when dealing with the company where I just worked.

First, the problem inherent in our company has a lot more to do with service than just customer service. To begin with, customer service tends to be lacking WITHIN the organization, so that quite often it can be a bit difficult to deal with other parts of the company because of the silos that have been created and maintained. When you have that sort of atmosphere going on, telling those same employees that they now need to focus on customer service when they’re having enough trouble providing company service to each other, well, there’s a dysfunction already harming the larger issue.

One day last year, I was on the bus near the main hospital when I overheard a conversation between a bunch of the passengers. One said something about our hospital, as in he’s never been there and people always told him to avoid it. And then people chimed in about how the people that worked there were rude, the services were all overpriced, and not a single one of them failed to mention our competition as the better facility to go in case you ever need health care needs fulfilled. I brought this conversation back to my organization when I first heard it, and the immediate response I received from management was a reinterpretation of the message, that they were complaining because they couldn’t afford the good health care that was provided by our establishment, not that it was overpriced; when it came to the customer service part, they just continued talking about how because they were already miffed at the prices, they would interpret anything else as negative. Basically, they had solid information from people who were complaining, and the response was that obviously they were confused about what they were complaining about, so nothing needs to be changed.

This is the organization that now needs to “improve” customer service by teaching employees how to give free pickles as ice cream parlors. Keep in mind that we don’t give out free health care, free testing supplies (or tests), cut rates on surgery, an actual better product than any other health care facility (even though the argument keeps being made that they do, based on a sample size of none, as statistics don’t really make a lot of sense when you’re comparing to yourself (one divided by one still does manage to equal one).

So, how do you improve customer service when you actually don’t pay any attention to the public to whom you are now supposed to be providing better customer service? The simple answer is you don’t. The solution isn’t really a riddle, but an acknowledgement that perhaps we need to go out into the population and talk to them, find out what they would like from a large hospital system that claims to know what they need without actually asking them, and perhaps worrying less about pickles and more about why people might be there in the first place. I was in the hospital last year with a kidney problem, and I was scared during the time I was in there. One of the worst doctors I’ve ever experienced was one who was actually from the place where I worked. She didn’t care one iota about how her patients felt, and she was kind of a moron as well (which as a communications person, I attributed to the fact that she had zero listening skills, which made her diagnosis work absurdly bad).

Which brings me back to the whole communication aspect of this whole situation, which you probably should have guessed it would come in at some point or another. If you want to figure out what’s wrong with your customer service, talk to your customers and try to find out. It’s a good thing to look at comment cards and all that, but quite often a comment card is one of those things logged AFTER a bad experience, which means you don’t really have the opportunity to fix what was wrong, and like the place where I worked, they probably never will.

Some of these things should go without being said, but unfortunately I think that’s the problem. They haven’t been said, and thus, people are now convinced they have the answers after having watched some old entrepreneur talk about giving pickles to customers when they ask for them.

Hospitalization, Changing One’s Ways and How People Still Can’t Communicate

Education, Healthcare, , , , , , ,

I’ve been debating about writing this topic for a few days now, but I guess enough time has finally passed that it’s possible to at least try to deal with it.

I’m in the hospital today. It’s my fifth day, and the doctors still can’t make a decision on when I might get out. My life kind of hangs on the balance of some numbers on a blood test that gets drawn three times a day, and while it appears to be getting better, it’s not “out of the woods” yet, so no one will even conjecture at the possibilities of me ever leaving this place.

Some explanation is probably necessary. I am a diabetic. I have been one most of my adult life. Normally, I’ve maintained it by diet, exercise, a combination of pills and sacrifices to the Goddess Shania Twain. Over the years, my diet has wavered (not always for the best), exercising became easy to chalk up to “probably tomorrow…” and then “probably next week….”, although The Shania has never had a lack of constant attention and appropriate worship.

One of the drugs introduced into my regiment for dealing with this condition turned out to be a lot more toxic to me than it should have been (or so their theory is…can’t really nail the specialists down on what happened, or is happening, but that’s kind of the premise of the voices that are coming down from their mountain), and it managed to inflame my pancreas and turn off my kidney (or something like that). My first realization of something being wrong was waking up in the middle of the night and finding myself completely disoriented in my own room, unable to figure out how to get into the kitchen (where instinctively I realized I needed something to eat). For two hours, I was stuck in my bedroom because I could neither stand up and would come crashing down very fast every time I tried, nor could I turn the door handle of my bedroom door because in my state it was completely beyond me. After two hours, and breaking down my closet door by accident, thinking it was my bedroom door, I managed to open the door and then spent another fifteen minutes trying to crawl across the floor of my living room to my kitchen. Then I found myself completely unable to open the refrigerator (you know those super-security refrigerators that consist of a door that requires you to just tug on it softly to open it? Yeah, one of those). After awhile, I was able to grab a car of apple juice by flinging my hands at it and throwing it to the ground. Then I drank it down in little guilty sips. 15 minutes later, I started to return to normal again.

Apparently, that kind of alerted the medical community that Duane needed some assistance, and here I am at St. Mary’s Hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

One thing I was always adamant about was that if I ever reached a point where I was forced to have to start taking insulin (instead of pills), most people who know me should expect to read of my untimely demise not soon after. I’ve watched too many people get devastated by this disease, and I always swore that I wouldn’t go down that road. Strange. Now, I’m on it. But that’s a subject for later, obviously.

The thing that’s kind of bugging me right now is this medical establishment behavior of always expecting the patient is going to just buy into the ethical commication “care” response system because they live in it every day. Let me give you an example. One thing I abhor more than anything is pricking my fingers with these little needle devices to check blood sugar. It doesn’t hurt that much. It’s not even that messy. But it’s MY FINGERS. I’m a writer who HATES to do anything to my fingers in this way, and even as I write this blog right now, I am reminded with each and every letter I type that something other than my creative thinking is driving my thought process right now. And it continues to hurt a long time. My whole right hand right now has been pricked so many freaking times that I lost count several days ago. By the time I finish this post, someone will come in demanding that either they prick me, or I do the “brave” thing and prick myself.

Which is the other side of that issue that I wanted to discuss (by the way, someone just came in to prick my finger and has now moved on his way). The main nurse who has been working with me since I’ve been here has adopted a communication schema that has been driving me nuts. For those wondering what I’m talking about, a communication schema is a shortcut set of comments and statements that someone uses to deal with specific situations because a previous encounter using those same schema resulted in positive results. Think of it as a lion hunter who continues to run away from the lion until he picks up a chair and waves it at the lion, causing the lion to back off. Suddenly, he has a tool he can use to make sure that the lion doesn’t eat him. Okay, stupid example, but you probably get the idea.

This nurse, in order to get me to want to prick my fingers, keeps using the same schema of “It’s a horrible disease. It doesn’t care who you are. It’s unfeeling.” And if that doesn’t work, he ramps it up to:  “If not treated, you’ll end up having to come back here under the following circumstances: (fill in gruesome details).”

The problem with schema is that it has to pertain to the individual who it is being used on. If I was some young kid who thought that I could just continue living my life in a wild fashion, and I just wasn’t thinking about the ramifications of such things, his schema works really well. It would make me think. However, that’s not me. Consider what I said earlier. I said that if I ever ended up in this situation, there’s a pretty good chance I’d not be alive much longer. This means that I’m not thinking Bad Outcome From Disease vs. Not Doing Anything but my mathematics of a cost benefit analysis wavers the premise of Not Being Alive vs. Having to Deal With all the Shit. In that context, a reconstituted schema that pertains to the wrong emotions is probably not the one to be focused upon.

I understand the need to preach caring about certain things to people, but you have to at least appeal to the same contextual algorithms that drive each individual’s needs.

The truly sad thing is: I’ve been stuck in the hospital for about five days so I’ve been unable to do anything I enjoy doing. Hopefully, this will end soon and we can see where things go from here.