Yes, we did

The other day I was watching television and a commercial for Domino’s pizza came on. You may have seen it. If not, when you do I hope similar thoughts go through your head. It wasn’t how good the pizza looked that made me hungry to eat one, but the message that was portrayed made me hunger for more hospital efforts around transparency.

So let me give you a sneak peak about this commercial. The commentator is talking about all the negative feedback and complaints about their pizza (and I had heard that Domino’s wasn’t doing all that well in terms of sales). I didn’t change the channel but kept my ears perked to listen even more. He continues to say that Domino’s actually took feedback from customers and posted it in their kitchens. Our chefs have taken all the advice and have, Yes, listened. Starting from scratch, they changed their sauce and their crust to make it taste and look better. They even ask that customers take a picture of the pizza when it is delivered and send it to them, as they want to be sure that it meets expectations! So their mantra is “Yes, we did.”

The commercial really resonated with me in terms of how they faced the hard part of why their pizza was not good–that if they wanted a change they had to make a change. The feedback was “in their face.” They could either hide and stay the same and eventually go under in terms of business, allowing the competition to take over; or they could take a hard look at themselves, listen to the customer, kick the dust off their boots and do better! They chose to do better.

Now what if we in healthcare took on our issues with this attitude? Let’s look at how we could play it out. The commercial begins with some healthcare workers at a table along with some administrators with suits on. They are in a meeting. The easel holding their data has a trend line going up. “Our errors are going up folks. Patient satisfaction scores are going down. We have decided to post our patient complaints here and work on these issues.” A common characteristic of hospital culture is not to acknowledge mistakes are made until they are made, and even then some hide their unanticipated outcomes. Although we know that patients have a right to be informed of unanticipated outcomes, we don’t always disclose them. We don’t want to be a “No, we didn’t” organization. Those organizations that are not proactive are not high reliability organizations! Fear of litigation is a main reason we don’t talk about errors with the patient and family. On the flip side, though, we send out patient satisfaction flyers or have discharge follow up calls. Better yet, we post signage (required) to inform patients of our complaint process. Then we get the feedback and we don’t dissect it or align our strategies with those areas patients say we need to improve?

Domino’s delivers pizza. There are likely not many court cases around bad pizza (unless they are food poisoning cases!). So if they are taking pizza seriously, why don’t we who deliver healthcare and save lives take transparency to heart and say, yes we did!

Nicola Heslip, RN, BSN, CPHQ, CLNC, CPSO
President at Turning Point Healthcare Consulting, LLC

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