Doug and I felt very privileged to be part of the QLD Clinical Senate Forum last week. Doug was invited to sit on the panel with the moderator being Jenny Brockie from the SBS Insight program. The broad topic of the evening was “WHAT IS VALUE IN HEALTH CARE AND HOW DO WE MEASURE VALUE IN TERMS OF BOTH CLINICAL AND PATIENT OUTCOMES”. In this day and age of financial cut backs to funding in health expenditure it is a very interesting question. Most accountants firstly would think of value as being all about the bottom line however this is not the only value that should be measured. In some cases it should not even come into the equation. From a patient perspective value in health care outcomes is all about quality of life. If you suffer from a chronic illness value is more about whether I can get from A to B without too much assistance. Most of us just take all of this for granted and never even consider the daily activities of going to work, school etc.
So how as a business in health care can these attitudes be adopted when dealing with your clients/patients. I found one of the main consistent responses from patients was simply to listen and engage with them. We are all often so busy trying to seek our own agenda in distributing what we think is important that we don’t really listen to their responses. By just stopping and listening to the client/ patient we are able to not only show that they are valued and we care but through better engagement with them we are able to offer further information on issues that they feel are important as well. This can lead to building a long term relationship with them and therefore building trust. Once this has been established you will find the benefit from their trust is that profit will be added to your business in terms of repeat business and their customer loyalty and referrals.
This is a very interesting subject so for further information refer to
