Page 100 - Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company

Never a Customer, Always a Guest 81

staggering with its double beds, Jacuzzis for labor pain relief, and beautiful
lounges where loved ones could wait. In came a brand-new staff of young,
idealistic male and female doctors who understood what mothers wanted
and needed.
It didn’t take long for Griffin to double its business and become the
talk of the town with its new childbirth center, a place where expectant
mothers were thrilled to go to bring their children into the world.
“We looked at that and said, “Wow—now we have seen such great
success in using this consumer-research model, how do we take this hospi-
21
tal wide?” recounts Griffin vice president, William Powanda. In keeping
with their maternity behavioral paradigm of “patient as guest,” they took
their employees to off-site retreat locations and asked them what they liked
and didn’t like as customers of healthcare. They knew that their employees
were critical to the success of a new hospital model; after all, they would
be the ones to live it each and every day. The retreats were a catharsis for
many staffers who had been delivering patient service for 20 years and now
realized that they hadn’t really been meeting the needs of their patients.
Some cried and asked themselves and one another, “Why didn’t I see
this before?” To be fair, painfully few hospitals anywhere in the world
were designed to support nurses in providing true “guest service” to their
patients. And, surely there was no need for that in the old paradigm.
Even with the escalating staff buy-in to a new way of life at Griffin,
the facility was in such disrepair that fixing would be a daunting task. To
begin with, the patients’ rooms had no air-conditioning, although many
of the nurses’ stations did. This was certainly inconsistent with the new
model where the goal was to make patients feel at home.
Patrick and the vice president of patient-care services were charged with
transforming both the care delivery model and the facility. The primary goal
was to build the facility to deliver the best care. On one fateful benchmark-
ing journey, Patrick and his associate discovered a new humanistic model
of health care called Planetree, which was alive and well in a 13-bed hos-
pital unit in northern California. The Planetree environment was tranquil,
with soft lighting and soothing music, and above all, it supported patient
empowerment.
The whole premise seemed to dovetail beautifully with Griffin’s
belief that creating a warm and caring place where patients are intimately
involved in their care and treatment is imperative to delivering quality
(Continued)