In a world full of chaos, busyness, and unforeseen contingencies, the need for reliable and predictable services in the healthcare industry cannot be overemphasized. Customers or patients crave order more than anything else. They want to know what to expect each time they walk into your facility and rely on you to satisfy them just the way you did the last time. The problem is, most hospitals and healthcare facilities leave their patients on the edge, not knowing what to expect. Yesterday, their service would be top-notch; today, a different story, and tomorrow? No one can say for sure what would happen.
WHY?
The question that comes to mind almost immediately. No business can produce consistent results or offer predictable services if it depends on its owner to function. Meaning things work well when the boss is around, and will not when he is not around, because employees are merely working to impress him not to get things done effectively. Such businesses would not be scalable and cannot grow beyond their neighborhood.
THE ANSWER IS CALLED “OPERATIONAL MANUAL”
When there are well-designed, well-documented systems, almost anyone can operate efficiently, the value of the business will scale up, and their method of producing results can even be franchised.
So down to how you welcome patients or admit them into the wards, the process of doing anything and everything must be defined and well documented. If your patients like it when you welcome them with a smile and ask them how their day went first before searching for their folders, do it all the time, I mean, your staff must be taught to do it all the time. Let it be documented and become your system for welcoming patients.
Producing consistent results or offering predictable services is then a function of having laid out procedures for getting things done. Documenting these processes goes a step further to underscore their importance and screams, “this is how we do it here” even louder.
It is this standard documented process of getting things done that is called the Operational manual.
WHY YOU NEED AN OPERATIONAL MANUAL
This manual guides your staff to reliably and efficiently carry out their tasks with consistent results or offer predictable services.
This way, excellence or productivity does not depend on staff discretion but well-defined systems. Human error would also reduce, and every one precisely informed on what they need to do, who they are responsible for, and who they are accountable to.
It creates order.
When your business looks orderly, it tells your patients you know what you are doing, your staff knows what they are doing, and they can rely on your business to satisfy them all the time.
It is a tool for training new staff and integrating them into the working process of the organization.
It introduces a form of synchrony between the new employees and the team they would be working with or the department they will be working in before they even start work.
It gives the business owner more time to focus on other higher-level and more strategic functions of their business rather than petty worries about their employees’ deficiencies.
It makes your business scalable and increases its value.
When a company depends on its owner, it is not a transferable asset or system. The reason being that the owner would be the system, and the owner is not a transferable asset. But when policies are in place, the business would have a model that can be franchised, or sold if the owner desires.
It is sad to know that most healthcare businesses lack a well-defined system of rendering services. They hire new staff, work them around the hospital, acquaint them with the general expectations, and leave them to their intuition to get things done excellently. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work anywhere in the world, especially in the business world. The staff would eventually disappoint those expectations, and you, the boss, would be thinking of hiring new staff. In your mind, your team is the problem, but in reality, you are, your system is. Knowing what you have been doing wrong is the first step to getting out of the pit. So get to work immediately and get an operational manual.
But before you ask, where you can get the perfect Operational Manual,it is good you know it does not exist. While certain things like timed responsiveness, courtesy, and warm conversations may seem to work generally for most hospitals and healthcare facilities, you must develop your operational guide based on what works best. Finding what works best would also mean having a system aimed at satisfying patients, not making profits. These systems must be subject to continuous improvement by finding new ways to do things better.
MedPau offer a wide range of Staff training and Consultancy services. We also help hospitals develop their Operational manual by walking them through what works best.
