In Last Friday’s Weekly Report, I began a segment about having meaningful and purposeful patient interactions. In communication, in diagnosis and in general to begin building relationships and creating trust.
I laid out exactly how important it is to have an effective Huddle every day that drives this very thing – the purposefulness of your teamwork towards your patients and thereby your goals. I know mostly our Doctors read the Weekly Reports on Fridays so I wanted to extend this team wide, since it is very important.
Keeping with my theme of “P” words (oddly there are a lot of them), this one is directly connected to the previous two…
Be Present.
Be Positive.
Be Purposeful.
Here’s the thing: if you don’t act, think and talk with Purpose – then you shouldn’t be on the team and definitely shouldn’t be taking care of other human beings.
Think about other places where you’ve witnessed customers not being treated with purpose. It happens just about everywhere. You see social conversations, cell phone use, facebook checking and an environment where it appears that the people are focused on anything but the customer. In fact, the customers are more of an inconvenience, instead of the point and purpose.
You must be different. It takes the best to really put their focus – their moment by moment focus – on the “customer.”
I know this is you. I know you truly care for your patients. You just can’t take that for granted and ever become complacent.
You have to resist the urge to be distracted or take the easy road or do “less than” just because no one will notice. And, the truth is, the patient might not even notice the difference – but you will. Use that to monitor yourself and to hold your own actions accountable.
There is nothing that will be more effective for improving patient outcomes, getting more yeses and hitting your goals than being more purposeful.
This week, I’m going to let you define what that means to you and your team.
I want you to talk about this and be specific where, how and when you can improve. We all are capable of being more purposeful with our interactions and our communication with patients.
Now, let’s flip that coin over and understand that more so than patients you have each other – and your purposeful interaction with each other – leads to either making everyone more effective or less effective with patients.
The team’s commitment to being purposeful with one another about helping out, about conversations, about even disagreements and especially about the next two week’s Daily Focuses we will be going over.
There is much to dissect and discuss on this topic. I challenge you to bundle the last three weeks together and really elevate your expectations of yourself and your team. Remember, all objectives and desired outcomes with your patients first and always start with – YOU!
