Daily Trust (Abuja)
Abubakar Yakubu
8 July 2009
Abuja — The Bwari General Hospital has been told to train their staff on customer care and complaints handling in order to ensure that patients who come to the hospital get quality services from all departments of the hospital.
The call was made yesterday when the Chief SERVICOM Officer, Mrs. Christiana Famro presented 'SERVICOM's Compliance Evaluation' of the services of the hospital to the management.
Famro said constant training of frontline staff on customer care would help them to effectively investigate and resolve cases of service failure and poor services in the hospital. "The hospital should develop a customer care policy that will guide staff on treatment of customers. Customer satisfaction surveys should be conducted on a regular basis to determine the level of satisfaction of customers" she said.
She advised further that the hospital would satisfy its patients if it develops and publishes a standard waiting time for services rendered at the hospital, so that the customers know how long it would take them to wait for services at various service points.
The SERVICOM officer observed that patients are often worried over the situation of their health, especially when they wait endlessly to see a doctor and in some cases, people's health degenerate while they wait at the General Outpatient departments of hospitals.
She informed the hospital consider computerizing its medical records for easy retrieval of patients' records in the long run as well as to consider constructing a shade for relatives of patients who bring their sick ones from remote areas.
According to her, SERVICOM's evaluation revealed some strength in the services rendered by the Bwari General Hospital, including the fact that the hospital has the lowest waiting time, compared to all hospitals in the Federal Capital Territory.
She said mystery shoppers from SERVICOM that took services at the hospital, discovered that no patient spent up to an hour before seeing a doctor as was the case in other hospitals in Abuja.
"Your management has also adopted a practise called 'defaulter tracing'. This entails calling up and visiting the residents of defaulting patients on DOTS and ARV to ensure they do not skip appointments and taking medications. This is wonderful and should be emulated by other hospitals", she added.
She announced that the service of the hospital was rated one-star or poor service, although she observed there were signs that the hospital had the capacity to improve services.
In his reaction, the Chairman of the Hospital, Dr Amos Babade described the report as a scorecard and described it as a challenge, assuring that management would work to improve services rendered by the hospital.
Highlights of the visit was the commissioning of the hospital's new staff canteen by the Chief SERVICOM Officer as well as the inspection of trees planted by top management staff of the hospital, as a way of beatifying the environment.
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