Our second journey will be as an in- or out-patient at a hospital. Almost all of us can associate with some type of hospital experience, either as a patient or in support of someone in our families who was a patient. Many good and rigorous changes have occurred in hospitals around the country as their processes have been re-engineered over the last several decades. Let's talk in a general sense about some of the activities you might encounter as a patient being processed for some type of surgery.
In most circumstances you have to do go to the facility and complete several pre-admission activities that gather information about you. At each stage of the process, the staff confirms who they are talking to before they start drawing samples for laboratory analysis, taking x-rays, if needed, evaluating your current health and associated risk for the type of surgery you are scheduled to undertake, reviewing a multitude of documents that inform you of the risks of the procedure, securing your authorization, obtaining copies of your Will, medical instructions, emergency contact information, current medications, and so forth.
On the day of the procedure, you are first greeted by a receptionist that confirms your procedure time, who you are, what procedure you are having, the names of individuals who are in the waiting room with you, that you have completed all the pre-admission requirements, attaches an identification bracelet to your arm, and the like. Once completed, off you eventually go for further preparation.
At this next stage, the nurse will once again confirm who you are, compare your bracelet to the paperwork, and confirm from you what procedure you are to undertake. They might start inter-venous solutions. They will talk to you about where you will go from there, possibly to a pre-surgery holding area. Once you get to the holding area the process starts all over again.
Once its time for you to go to surgery, another team arrives, and guess what, they ask all the same questions again and then take you to another holding area where you get to answer all the same questions one more time. In this area you may get visited by the anesthesiologist to see if you have any questions and so forth, and you guessed it, he or she will check your charts, your arm band, ask you what you are having done, if you have any questions, etc. Then the big moment arrives and here comes another team to take you to surgery. Your not done, they ask all the same questions before they wheel you to the scheduled operating room.
Upon arrival at the surgery suite, the surgery team helps you onto the table, and one last time, with you anyway, ask you all the same questions and perform all the same confirmations. After your off in happy land, the surgery team and doctors collectively discuss what is to be done, confirm that they have the correct person, that all the necessary supplies are ready and available, and begin the procedure.
After surgery you go to recovery, where all these confirmations occur between teams delivering and those receiving, obviously without much help from you. In recovery you are stabilized and eventually returned to a room for some duration, all the while under the care and control of one or more teams of professionals.
Every medication you receive has a multitude of checks and balances to ensure that it is correct, that it is administered correctly, and that confirmation of who the medicine is given to is made before it is administered. Normally this is done between a minimum of two of the staff through visual and verbal confirmation.
I have only struck the high notes on this process, but I think you can see there are many moving parts and a great many areas in which barriers (both engineered and administrative) have been instituted in order to preclude a threat (human or other) from initiating a hazard (unwanted event) from occurring.
Now lets go back to values and behaviors that a hospital would be interested in having each employee totally embrace. Such things as quality, stability, integrity, good reputation, enthusiasm for the job, taking individual responsibility, being rule-oriented, paying attention to detail, being calm, being supportive, having high performance expectations, having a clear guiding philosophy, achievement orientation, being team-oriented, being people-oriented, decisiveness, being highly organized, and so forth, are critical to the success of this organization.
Hospitals strive for these attributes in their employees and professional staff. Your health and well being depend on it. Most of these institutions are very large and employ great numbers of people. It is not uncommon for several thousand people to work for just one hospital. Much rigor is employed to ensure that all its employees meet high technical and educational standards, but it takes special pre-employment testing to ensure they have the personality that will exhibit the behaviors that you are desiring, such as attention to detail that was mentioned previously.
Without improving the selection process prior to actual employment of a candidate, neither the restaurant nor the hospital will have much assurance that this human will perform as expected. In an ideal world, all 2000 of the hospital's employees would excel at every needed behavior, but what if five percent didn't totally "get it?" What do you think your chances would be of encountering one of the 100 who didn't totally "get it" in one of the processes we just discussed in the surgery example? And what could be the possible consequences? What about the restaurant? From you experiences being a patron, how many of the employees "get it?"
In my next blog we will begin the process of trying to determine our core and supporting values that are so essential to the success of our respective organizations.
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