No News is Bad News!

I had a recent personal experience with a hospital, or to be more specific, the service from a hospital. My father has been a patient for a number of months and had an unfortunate incident that required serious intervention, to the point that he needed CPR! We were thankful he survived, but in the following days we began to question some of the circumstances around the incident. It transpired that a mistake was made by a member of staff and the outcome of that mistake, was what led to my father requiring CPR. Cutting to the chase, the hospital admitted this mistake and said they would undertake an investigation and report back on their findings.

Sounds reasonable? Maybe? Anyway..... in the meantime, thankfully my father stabilized and got back to his normal state of ill health, having avoided death! However, we never got a report back from the hospital about the incident. In my slightly pissed off state, I formally complained to the hospital about the incident and the poor communication regarding their follow up on the incident. To my surprise, the hospital responded back to me the next day acknowledging the complaint and again the following day (a Saturday!) with an undertaking to contact me to discuss the incident. I was encouraged with their effort. I received a call from a senior member of hospital management the following Monday. The lady I spoke with was pleasant, apologetic and sympathetic, furthermore, she was very disappointed that the communication from the hospital had been so poor. She went on to tell me that my fathers case was very high on her agenda and outlined the process and status of the investigation that the hospital had initiated. In brief, she led me to believe that despite my own perception that the hospital were not doing anything about my fathers case, the actual reality was that they were and in fact they were nearly doing more than I expected. The problem was..... They forgot to tell me!! The call with the lady from the hospital ended and she advised of the next steps and we agreed on a better way to communicate in the future. All very amicable.

As some of this conversation with the hospital occurred during working hours, I found myself still in work mode (I'm a service manager btw) and began to think about applying this incident to my own working environment. It made me think... how do I deal with incidents? How do I communicate with my customers? I work hard and get things done, but do I tell my customer what I'm doing!?! In most cases I do, well at least I like to think I do. But if i'm honest, I probably don't tell the customer all the time, or perhaps i don't tell them everything I am doing. This is because I assume they know I am doing everything I can. Hmmmm! I find this especially true when I need to take time to undertake my own investigations, or when I'm waiting for someone to come back to me with detailed information. Upon reflection, I realized that I do this because I always want to give the most complete picture to my customer and deliver the good news that I've resolved their problem, so I can offer them the assurance that their business is safe it won't happen again. I suspect that this is what the hospital were doing to me. They were waiting to conclude their investigation, waiting till they had all of the details and all of the information, the complete story, then they were going to call me!!! After my experience with the hospital, I've questioned my own behavior and realize that if i'm waiting for all the detail and all the information on an incident before I communicate with my customer, then perhaps they are also feeling frustrated and possibly assuming that I a doing nothing!

So what is the lesson learnt? What can I take from this incident with the hospital?........... I need to communicate more often. I shouldn't wait till I have all of the details, all of the information, all of the i's dotted and t's crossed. I should tell my customer what i'm doing throughout the process. Inform them of the status of the investigation i'm undertaking and in general, make more of an effort to just talk to them. Sometimes no news is good news, but in this case I believe it to be the opposite, 'No News is Bad News!'

Communication is vital in the world of service delivery. But yet sometimes I believe we are afraid to step out of our comfort zone and just talk, even without the comfort blanket of having all the information. The customer needs to know what's happening right now. If you don't have all the details, tell them how and when you are going to get for them. They'll probably even thank you for it!!