Feeling the customer’s pain

When I was in hospital for several weeks with Covid in 2021 I experienced the whole spectrum of service quality, from the outstanding to the adequate and occasionally down to the unacceptably poor, and I wrote something about it in this column – including referring to that wonderful book, If Disney Ran Your Hospital: 9½ Things You Would Do Differently.

Unfortunately last year I went through another challenging time with my health, but it allowed me to gather more case studies on how customer care works or doesn’t work in a hospital environment… which leads me to share this story with you today.

I lay quietly in my room as I awaited the summons for my lung scan, and on time Samuel the porter arrived with his wheelchair. What a gentle carer he was.

Once at the radiology department I hardly waited at all before being ushered into the scanning room. Great. Except that now the radiologist had to go and get the dye to inject into me.

It took forever, the very antithesis of just-in-time Kaizen, very challenging for me as I sat in my uncomfortable wheelchair.

Finally the radiologist returned and injected his dye into my arm before placing me on the scanning machine.

Now it was the usual, being told to put my arms above my head, against the plastic support, and my knees over another plastic support, where both felt increasingly awkward as the 20 minutes went by… a long long time for motionlessness, never mind with persistent and increasing discomfort.

The machine twisted round doing its thing, and I endured it all in silence… till it pressed down on my right arm to the extent that I worried it would crush it.

I adjusted somehow, but then the same thing happened with the left arm, but worse. So I shouted out, and fortunately he heard me.

“Oh, you should put your arms by your side now,” he informed me casually. Otherwise nothing from him, as he was totally focused on the technical aspects of his job.

To help me pass the time I began thinking about how this radiologist approaches his job and decided to have a word with him after we were done to share my perceptions.

To my surprise, after all the silence, right before the end he did mention that this was the final session and that it would take two minutes.

When we were done he called in Samuel, but I asked him to leave us for a while. “What’s your name?” I asked the scan man – as he had not introduced himself when I arrived, or said anything beyond the instructional.

“Amos Makau,” he replied (that’s what I’ll call him here). “Amos, would you mind if I give you some feedback about how I have found your interactions with me?” I continued, and as he readily agreed I launched into a coaching session on how to go beyond being a mere technician to being a carer with empathy and compassion for his patient – like Samuel (not his real name either) was.

“You need to talk with us, encourage and support us, recognise how hard and uncomfortable it is to lie there still for so long and so uncomfortably,” I explained, and I then asked him if he had ever experienced what we are being asked to. He had not.

“You should,” I suggested, “then you’ll understand so much better what we endure and how we need to be handled delicately.”

I did all this in a friendly way, not complaining, not hammering him, but offering him a new insight into what happens repeatedly in that room each day and how he can transform the way he interacts.

Amos got it, and he and I developed an excellent rapport. He told me he’d “work on” what I had suggested, leading me to urge him to just move in one go from not showing empathy and compassion to doing so.

We then called Samuel, who took me back to my room… where I told him he was not a porter but an angel.

OK, so that’s an example from the healthcare environment. But as I concluded in my earlier article, the lessons are for elsewhere too.

How many techies, accountants, engineers, you name it, overwhelm their clients with their jargon while remaining oblivious to the extent to which it is being absorbed, never mind comfortably?

How many coaches inhibit the talent they’re meant to be nurturing by not putting themselves in their shoes? So many questions, always the same answer: empathy and compassion.