BOCA RATON, FL – Staff from three departments – Emergency, Surgery & Internal Medicine – received scathing criticism from hospital administrators at today’s monthly meeting for allowing their patient satisfaction scores to “lag behind” the near 99% patient satisfaction marks earned by the Labor & Delivery floor.
“This is unacceptable” emphasized Chloë Less, Head of Quality Control. “We went into that meeting determined to figure out why satisfaction scores could be so different between a patient welcoming their first adorable bundle of joy and another patient in the very same hospital who just had a traumatic amputation of both legs after a motor vehicle collision. Clearly the Emergency, Surgical & Medical staff members aren’t pulling their weight. Our plan is to find somebody to blame.”
The hospital administrators’ PowerPoint presentation culminated in what Ms. Chloë Less characterized as “the knockout punch” for the 3 criticized departments. “Our last slide showed us that a hospital pathologist had earned a perfect 5-star online patient satisfaction rating [total survey sample of 2] despite never having interacted with patients. These are shocking numbers. And we all know that numbers never lie, and that the customer is always right.”
After the slideshow presentation ended, hospital administrators pressed the Emergency, Surgical & Medical floors to “think outside the box” and to come up with effective strategies to help their satisfaction scores “catch up” with Labor & Delivery.
“We, of course, informed all 3 departments that their staff members will be forced to attend a 16-hour-long remedial Customer Satisfaction Training Workshop, offered on weekends for the sake of convenience,” said Ms. Chloë Less. “But we wanted to make bold changes, and we were disappointed by the silence in the room.”
Hospital administrators subsequently sprung into action and presented multiple “quality solutions” to augment ER & Med/Surg patient satisfaction scores:
• Initiate an overhead alarm to alert staff in real time when the aggregate patient satisfaction scores drop below 95%. This system would mimic the national “Terror Level” threat with a complex rainbow color scheme (e.g. magenta would indicate that a patient on the floor was not satisfied with the soup selection from meal trays).
• Offer unlimited lozenges to patients, thereby bypassing the need for the nurse to page the physician at 3:01 AM for lozenge dispensation authorization.
• Dispense “Free Percocet” at strategic locations throughout the hospital campus, preferably near coffee machines on each floor so that the pills could be conveniently crushed & added to beverages.
• Cut pay for the nursing staff. Again.
• Expand the role of the newborn photographer on the Labor & Delivery floor to also take pictures of patients returning from the catheterization lab after massive heart attacks. Several hospital administrators suggested that the 3 “slacking” departments “follow the lead of Labor & Delivery” in helping patients who are battling life-threatening illnesses/accidents by making “cute little commemorative hand-prints & foot-prints” [except amputees] as keepsakes to take home and “cherish forever in their scrapbooks”
When contacted by GomerBlog for comment, trauma surgeon Sri-Sheshadariprativadibayankaram, MD, JD, MBA flatly said, “So now they’re comparing ‘the best day of my life’ to ‘the worst day of my life?’…….. Okay.”
