The Problem With Patient Satisfaction & Small Business When you own a small business, you live and die by customer satisfaction. You work hard to do right by your clients because one bad review can hurt just as much as one excellent referral can push your business to the next level. In medicine though, a nurse quite often is on the opposite end of that patient satisfaction scale. Advocating for what is right for the individual does not always mesh with what that individual really wants. Many nurses working in hospitals have received complaints, harassment, and even death threats from patients regarding their care, when in reality nurses were acting in the patient’s best interest (like not giving more pain medication than prescribed, or waiting until the correct time to give medication, instead of giving it earlier at the request of the patient). Relying solely on patient satisfaction to drive medically related situations is reckless and dangerous, both for the patient and the provider. They say patient satisfaction is killing us, and while I have written about this in the past, I have not really touched on its relevance when small business and medicine are combined. Client Centered Care Last […]
“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” Kurt Vonnegut Maximizing Your Efficiency I work all the time. I have been working all the time since I helped start our home care agency in 2011. Creating your own business is a business itself of fits and spurts – at the beginning you spend a considerable amount of time on paperwork, creating policies and processes, and getting your name out there. But then you hit a bit of a lull while you still continue to market yourself, all while anxiously awaiting your first client. Once you get going, you occasionally still have the lulls, during which you learn to tighten up procedures, pursue education, and shine up those marketing tactics which may have dulled over time. When you finally get comfortable with what you are doing, you start to dread and crave those lulls. Lulls are bad for business, but allow you a moment to breathe and make improvements. This difficult lesson is what I have learned – lulls are uncomfortable and scary, but if you are patient and persistent, you can use these times to shore up your resources and re-charge for […]