Gift supports initiatives to improve service culture for patients, visitors

Under a heading of “Show U Care,” the UW Academic Medical Center (AMC) is launching a series of initiatives aimed at service culture improvements at UW Medical Center, Harborview Medical Center and UW Physicians Neighborhood Clinics. The program is funded by a $2 million gift from private donors.

“While there are many wonderful examples of exemplary service by units and individuals throughout the UW AMC every day, we have never had a single set of standards or behaviors that define what ‘exemplary service’ truly means within our organization,” said John Coulter, associate vice president for medical affairs and chair of the UW AMC Service Culture Steering Committee. “This program will accomplish that, and at the same time will create mechanisms for recognizing and rewarding exemplary service, remediating situations where service perhaps has been far less than satisfactory, and giving units access to special funds that can be used to make permanent improvements in service delivery.”

Coulter said such service improvements are expected to positively affect patients and visitors to the UW’s two teaching hospitals and nine neighborhood clinics. “Just as importantly, the improvements should also affect everyday interactions both among co-workers within the UW AMC and between those same individuals and their counterparts - referring physicians, for example - at other institutions,” he said. “We want this program to give all UW AMC employees - physicians, nurses, technicians, housekeepers, maintenance workers, everybody else - the tools to bring about an entire shift in the way we look at our jobs and interactions with others.”

The Service Culture Steering Committee has adopted an overall service commitment statement for the UW AMC: “We treat others as though we are guests in their lives.” According to committee member L.G. Blanchard, director of Health Sciences and Medical Affairs News and Community Relations, the statement “speaks to the need for shifting the traditional view that patients, visitors, and colleagues are guests in our lives to the view that they have allowed us - indeed, honored us - to be guests in their lives.”

All hospital and clinic staff will be receiving a survey next month seeking their views on what specific customer-service practices best embody the UW AMC. The survey results will then be used by special focus groups of UW AMC employees to focus on the most important practices. These will form core service standards for UW AMC clinical employees, affecting hiring, training and performance evaluations.

Also, beginning later this year units will be able to apply for one-time funds from the endowment that they can use to implement model service-enhancing programs in their own areas, Coulter said.

“People in every unit should be able to think of things that they always have wanted in order to help make their patients and visitors feel more welcome and comfortable, but that they haven’t been able to obtain due to budget constraints,” he said. Grants will be awarded in $1,000 increments.

Another initiative is establishment of a Service Recovery Program, to assist patients and visitors in “recovering” from negative service experiences.

A formal procedure for first-point-of-contact problem resolution has begun with a pilot program in the Bone and Joint Center at UWMC and on 5-East Hospital, 6-East Hospital and the orthopaedic clinics at Harborview.

The program works like this: If someone has an unsatisfactory customer service experience (an extended wait time on the phone, for example) and complains about it, every effort will be made to work with the person to resolve the problem. Upon successful resolution of a problem, the responsible staff member will give the patient a small gift as a way to reinforce the apology. In the pilot program, the gift will be a voucher for a free beverage at the UWMC or Harborview espresso bars.

In the future, plans will be developed to recognize exceptional employee sensitivity to patient and visitor needs and reinforce the importance of exemplary service by rewarding special acts of kindness toward patients and visitors. ¶

Craig Degginger