Nice care...

I was reading an article in the nyt about the 6 habits of hightly respectful physicians and came across this posting in the comments afterwards (I love the comments, they are often more interesting than the articles, one of the benefits of the internet, that the article becomes the starting point and a conversation grows...)

During my residency we had a speaker from our professional society discuss some current state of the field topic. Somewhere in his talk he said something that has stuck with me. Nearly all patients don't know the difference between good care and not good care. What they do know, however, is the difference between "nice care" and "not nice care."

While being nice may not actually improve overall health outcomes it does improve the patient's experience and subsequently their view of our profession. There is zero downside to taking the time to introduce yourself, shake hands, and make them feel that their needs are going to be addressed.

And I thought, that’s so true of so many things. We often don't know the expertise required or the effort expended behind so many things, but we know when we are treated nicely or respectfully or not.

We are having a problem with one of our teachers at school, and the issue was that we didn’t know if she was teaching the curriculum correctly or not, but we did know that she wasn’t explaining herself clearly to the parents and this was giving her a host of problems that had nothing to do with her expertise.

And that’s where American customer service can excel or fail – if someone reads a screed from a computer screen with no feeling or humanity, the care might be ‘good’ but it’s definitely not ‘nice’ and you don’t feel looked after. It’s only when the other person makes a connection with you that you remember the service as good, even if they couldn’t do what you asked (at least they could explain – ‘the computer says no…’ to quote Little Britain…)

And that’s what I’ve been thinking about today…

More on Liza tomorrow (she was wonderful!)