EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This report was commissioned to examine the number of calls to the Medi – Call Personal Alarms Systems LTD call centre and how the management implement certain capacity strategies in order to distribute call times whether it be an emergency, technical or a reassurance call from the customer. This is viewed over a twelve-hour shift and highlights the problems where the call centre is over capacity or under capacity.
The case study looks at the problems with the current operations and service management within Medi–Call call centres. Within this report the main problems will be identified, for example – the amount of time that could be saved from each call from the customer (for more the more important emergency
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By looking at the table and the graph (appendices 3 and 4) we can see during the times the call centre is working at over capacity there are far higher numbers of technical calls and reassurance calls, than when they are under capacity. For an average technical call takes six minutes and for a reassurance call take seven minutes including administration time. For example looking at the typical morning in the Medi-Call call centre there is 763 minutes of call time wasted on reassurance calls alone; not to mention the time wasted on technical calls as well. Due to the severeity of the line of work Medi-Call deals with (peoples lives) it is crucial to find new ways to free up more time for the more important emergency calls; this will be discussed later in the report. They must rearrange how they operate in order to focus solely on the emergency calls and rearrange how the deal with the technical and reassurance calls and also make use of the time when they are under capacity – see appendices 3 and 4.
By having the staff of Medi-Call working at well over their capacity can create a number of problems for themselves and the customers. Putting the staff into the coping zone on a regular basis can have a number of effects on the service Medi-Call provides; for example - a sub standard service to the customer resulting in a loss of customers due to a bad
In order to eliminate the inefficiencies witnessed in many public and private hospitals that serve a number of patients, an integrated approach to handling the daily workload is necessary. There is need for all departments within the hospital to work closely together in ensuring more effective and efficient service deliveries. In this paper, a planned change is going to be carried out involving designing a new system that incorporates all the departments within the hospital. This includes the surgery department, pediatrics department, dentistry department, nursing department, pharmacy departments, laboratory and testing department, X-ray and Physiotherapy departments, Equipment maintenance and Engineering department, Information Technology
14 million Canadians visit Emergency Departments (ED) every year, and also reported to having the highest use of EDs (Ontario Hospital Association, 2006). ED overcrowding in Canada has become an epidemic. ED overcrowding has been defined as “a situation in which the demand for emergency services exceeds the ability of an (emergency) department to provide quality care within acceptable time frames” (Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care, 2014). This has been an ongoing problem across Canada. Ontario has developed an initiative to reduce ED wait times by implementing a variety of strategies and collaborating with other institutions. This paper describes the Emergency Room National Ambulatory Intuitive (ERNI), an
The basic reason for this study is to identify ways to improve the quality of healthcare among patients through bedside reporting method.This will better satisfaction and services delivered at the hospitals. The ever increasing specialization to improve patient outcomes and better health care delivery can contribute to the serious riskof fragmentation of care and problems with handoffs. These are some of the issues associated with emergency room reporting method (Radtke, 2013). There is need to evaluate the handoff method used in hospitals and understand which is the best way to use that increases patient satisfaction. Bedside handoff gives the patient an opportunity to contribute to his or her plan of care. It allows the nurse to visualize the client and as necessary questions regarding their health status. This is the reason there is a need to conduct research on bedside reporting.
|or phone calls come in for a patient, it is important to check | | | | | | | | | | |
The modern day emergency room is a department that is constantly busy. In the hustle of caring for patients, there are some details of the patient’s care that can be overlooked in a standard phone report to the accepting nurse. With this in mind, a change is needed so that there is an optimum patient outcome for each and every one of the people that walk through the doors of the emergency room and get admitted.
Another way to alleviate the overcrowded schedule is by making patient appointments for every other time slot. If a patient calls in for an
According to the survey, our patients didn’t enjoy their experience before their appointment. 73% of patients said that the receptionist did not greet them immediately. I know this was the case when I walked in for my meeting. The receptionist was on her phone texting instead of being aware of patients that could potentially be walking into the facility. Although the receptionist doesn’t greet them right away, 67% of people agree she was respectful and courteous. However, the biggest issue lies with patients not understanding the co-pay and possibility of additional costs. This is a problem that can be fixed easily, we just need to retrain our receptionists to greet each patient with a warm smile, and how to fully explain the costs that patients are required to pay. The receptionist play an important role in customer service, therefore they must be at the top of their game at all times. In order to fix the overall patient experience at our urgent care facility, I think we need to send out more surveys and bring back the follow-up calls. The follow up calls are important because patients will be able to express any concerns they had with their visit and we would be able to
This research is trying to answer the question of how to reduce overcrowding in emergency rooms? Would people would want to access published wait times provided on the internet, and would this guide a patient make decisions on where they receive their care. The hypothesis being one, crowding maybe reduced with having upfront information, and therefore also provide increased patient satisfaction due to waiting less. Patients would have more choices available to them such as
1.1 When going into a call the first thing that should be done is to get all the materials that you need together in order to provide care. For example, if someone is bed ridden and you are changing their pad then you will need to get the clean pad, carrier bag, toilet roll, baby wipes, towel, cream if applicable and usually the slide sheet ready. By not having everything ready you will have to stop what you are doing and go and get things. The individual during this time is rolled on their side and no doubt in some discomfort and delaying the proceedings to go and get things only increases this discomfort. After providing care all materials
the workload within the current services” – this points out that there is a shortage of internal resources to
The abstract of the study clearly and concisely summarized the main features of the report. It stated that the study was conducted as a qualitative, ethnographic research. Then, it briefly described the problems associated with call bells and how these problems affected patients’ perceptions regarding the quality of care. It explained that the study identified three interrelated themes regarding communication through call bells including answering the call bell, communicating the patient’s request to the appropriate health care provider and following through with the
As can be seen in Table 1 below, the resources causing the long wait times are those that are over utilized, or those that show capacity utilizations greater than 100 percent. The only over utilized resource are the Physicians, who are being over utilized by 21 percent. The other major resources are still underutilized.
The current average utilization rate of the call centre is 30.48% (see appendix XXX). The average arrival rate, rate at which the patients call, is lower than the average service rate, rate at which the patients are serviced. However, both the arrival time and the service time contain moderate variability (see appendix XXX), negatively impacting the flow time during peak hours. There are two arrival rate variability issues: variability amongst the different days the calls are received and variability amongst the hours the calls are received. The problem is bigger than Laura anticipated. As per the ‘Appendix 5’ of the case, the average daily abandoned calls are 338 and not 35. This does not include the patients receiving a busy signal, therefore becoming lost throughputs. Thus given the low utilization rate it is clear that the problem the call centre faces is in managing variability and not capacity.
Middletown Hospital is a 200-bed, not-for-profit-general hospital that has an emergency department with 20 emergency beds. The emergency department handles on an average 100 patients per day. The hospital’s CEO has authorized the Six Sigma Team (SST) to address complaints received from patients seeking treatment between 6:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. The complaints are centered on waiting times and poor service. During this time the data indicates that approximately 70% of the department’s admissions occur (University of Phoenix, 2009, Course Syllabus).
1 The tourism school, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou, China; 2School of Business Administration, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou, China. Email: chenjue8@yahoo.com