Dealing with Difficult Customers by Noah Fleming

Author:Noah Fleming
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Career Press
Published: 2018-01-27T05:00:00+00:00

Part II

Chapter 5

The Three Disciplines of Excellent Customer Service Organizations

How to Save Millions of Lives and Have Doctors Hate You

“They say that when all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail. That’s why carpenters make such poor babysitters.”

—Cracked Magazine

In late 2006, Dr. Atul Gawande received a call from a representative of the World Health Organization, who had a small favor to ask him. They wanted to get his help in creating a program that would reduce the number of deaths and harm from surgeries and would be applicable to any hospital in the world.

They didn’t really have a budget to do this, and the goal was outrageously aggressive. In 2004, surgeons were performing 230 million surgeries per year, and complications during surgery were causing serious harm. More than seven million people per year were being left disabled, and more than one million people per year were dying because of complications during surgery.

It seemed like an impossible task—the equivalent of telling an ambitious but troublesome child to dig a hole to the other side of the world so you can have a few minutes of peace.

Nevertheless, Dr. Gawande took on the challenge. What’s more, he succeeded beyond anybody’s wildest dreams.

He and his team found a way to reduce surgery-related injuries and deaths, not by one or two percentage points, but by almost half. It was something simple enough that it could be implemented in every operating theatre in the world, whether it was in the middle of a battlefield or at the Mayo Clinic.

Based on these numbers, this would lead to millions fewer people being left disabled, and hundreds of thousands of fewer deaths every year.

It’s the kind of success rate that is impossible to ignore, even if you wanted to. So why did many doctors fight its implementation tooth and nail?

The title of Dr. Gawande’s fantastic book about the program, The Checklist Manifesto, may provide a clue.

The intervention that Dr. Gawande and his team discovered wasn’t complex. It wasn’t a new surgical technique or a new drug. Instead, it was the use of a checklist during every surgery.1

Many doctors felt, in essence, that the checklist was beneath them. They felt it was an admission they needed help or weren’t masters of their craft. They were arguing, “I spent four years doing my undergrad study, and then another two years of med school before I was allowed in a hospital. I’ve spent another five years working my butt off in hospitals all around the country, eating, sleeping, and breathing surgery. I know what I’m doing, and I don’t need your little checklist to help. On top of that, every patient is different, and every surgery is different. You can’t capture what I do in a checklist. It might be good for pilots and some other professions, but what I do is too complex to make it very helpful.”

Remember, the study showed a reduction in deaths and injuries of between 30 and 47 percent in most cases.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.