Creating a Respectful Relationship-Centered Health Care System

What do your staff attitude and opinion surveys and/or Press-Ganey results indicate? How do your internal customers (staff) and external customers (patients and referral resources) perceive the delivery of your health care services? The Respectful Care program is all about creating positive relationships among staff, and transferring those relationship skills to patient care. While the overriding emphasis in health care is on positive treatment outcomes, most health care providers do not pay enough attention to the relationship aspect of medicine. The relationship aspects of our care, helps create the positive treatment outcomes. Creating a respectful relationship culture for staff and patients can differentiate your clinic, hospital or health care system from the competition. In other words, when people have positive experiences about how they were treated, they will come back and they will tell others.

Given that the clinical service and treatment aspect of what most hospitals and clinics do is excellent, the Respectful Care program will only increase staff and patient satisfaction. The Respectful Care program is a common sense approach to improving internal relationships in order to improve external relationships. Unlike other customer service programs whose focus is on feeling or behavior change, this program’s focus is directed toward the internal first, and the external second; we advocate changing from the “inside-out” (our perceptions), not changing from “outside-in” (through scripted responses, feeling discussions or behavior management).

This program provides the tools to change perceptions and therefore change the organizational culture, and helps participants to respectfully confront others, to resolve disputes with a win/win outcome, to have positive patient and employee interactions, and recover from mistakes of others. It also helps with needs or interest-based bargaining.

Key Componets:

• Over come barriers of change to implement a respectful care culture
• Integrate all levels of health care delivery to promote respectful care
• Change patients’ perceptions of health care delivery
• Learn communication styles to empathically convey respect and compassion
• Create “side by side” and needs based problem solving strategies
• Create a proactive service recovery process
• Differentiate your medical services based on a respectful care culture

Objectives:

• Learn skill set necessary for respectful care
• Identify barriers and create implementation strategies for respectful care
• Apply techniques to change self/culture of the organization from the “inside out”
• Learn the influence of perceptions and creating lasting change by challenging negative perceptions
• Learn respectful ways of confronting situations
• Practice alternative ways of respectfully resolving disputes
• Learn three methods to diffuse difficult patients
• Identify three steps to service recovery from a bad experience