Healthcare satisfaction

For the Best in Hospitality, Visit Our Hospital!

But there’s a downside to super-nice nurses and doctors

Until recently, I wouldn’t have noticed that hospital and hospitality come from the same root word, but they do.

And now it all makes sense.

Once upon a time, you knew making an appointment with the doctor meant you’d be waiting for a good long time.

Your appointment might have been at 2 p.m., but you didn’t expect to see your doctor at that time. Haha! Your doctor was an important, busy man (yes, he was almost always a man) and you were nothing.

You would sit in a waiting room for a long time, surrounded by ancient magazines and the cob-webbed skeletons of those still waiting to have their names called.

Now? There’s a sign up in the waiting room advising you to complain if you have been waiting for more than 15 minutes.

I’ve been dealing with a breast lump lately.

I’ve had a number of appointments lately — an MRI, sonograms, mammograms, candygrams — well, I wish one had been a candygram. None of these have been enjoyable. (I’m going to be fine.)

But after each visit, I am handed a card with my caregivers’ names and am asked to give a good review.

It is much the same as being on Medium: “I hope you love me! Give me a clap and more reads! Please! I really need a high rating if I am to survive!”

I understand what’s going on.

I worked for a while at an advertising and marketing place with a lot of healthcare clients. That gave me some insight. They all seemed to have hired Press Ganey.

Much as selling peanut butter is more about convincing people your brand is better than actually making better peanut butter, being a successful healthcare organization is more about self-promotion than about providing better care.

I get it. But still.

It’s no longer enough to provide good medical care. You have to do it pleasantly.

Maybe you are literally sticking a needle into my breast and pulling out tiny chunks to be examined by a pathologist. Still, you will do it in such a way that I will give you a high rating.

Who cares about the ratings, though?

Hospitals do, if they want to get paid.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services provides patient scores that actually play a part in hospital reimbursement.

It’s a little bit like a restaurant having to comp your buffalo wings if you complain that they sucked. Even if you ate every single one of them.

What if you had a choice between a doctor with a great bedside manner who was pretty decent with a scalpel or a grumpy old curmudgeon who did the best work in the region?

I know, we would all love to have a doctor who is personable and tops in his or her field. But we don’t always get that, do we? People have different skills and personalities.

I will take the grumpy old curmudgeon with superior surgical skills over the heckuva nice guy who does OK at surgery and I bet you’d do the same.

We put a lot of stress on medical professionals.

They are burning out and leaving medicine in great numbers because we’ve made their already high-stress jobs almost intolerable.

Patients did not choose this. Doctors and nurses did not choose this, either. The insurance companies did.

Doctors almost never own their own practices anymore. They work for a healthcare system, and they become like assembly line workers. They’re expected to see far too many patients.

I don’t envy them.

The hospitality industry is about giving you a good time.

They want to make sure you enjoy yourself. If you’re visiting a resort, they want to make sure you have delicious food, a beautiful room, perfect service and first-rate amenities.

You are paying a lot of money in order to have fun and feel pampered and relaxed.

The hospital industry should not be about giving you a good time.

I’ve never had a good time at a hospital or medical appointment. It’s not how it works! I worry that hospitals are putting resources toward scoring well rather than putting them toward resources that are medically important.

I worry that they’re mixing up hospitality and hospital. They come from the same late 14th century French word, but this isn’t the 14th century. The two things are different now.

I appreciate being treated kindly and courteously, sure. It’s great that we seldom have to wait a long time for appointments.

But you are paying a lot of money in order to have your medical issue addressed correctly.

And in the end, that is really the only thing I care deeply about.

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I’m a writer in central Illinois. Find me on Substack, Mastodon, Twitter or LinkedIn.