Damaged Customer Satisfaction in Healthcare
Jessica L. Montoya
Southern Technical College

Working in the healthcare field can often be a challenge. There are always cost cutting approaches being used, some good, but mostly bad in my opinion. About six months ago at the nursing/rehabilitation facility where I have worked for the last eight years, a new CEO was hired. When touring our facility the CEO decided that our office staff would no longer have to have a professional license but only need secretarial skills in order to work there. Our current office staffs duties include answering call lights, tending to the patients’ needs such as bathroom use, changing, feeding, ect. Our Nursing staff are not always around to assist leaving our office staff the main source of meeting our patient’s needs. If you are not licensed you are not able to do anything for the patient except answer their call light, which is now the only thing our office staff can do.
When payroll is done monthly, the savings of almost $100,000 a month is what the CEO is seeing and he is not taking into consideration our customer service rating. Our patient’s needs are not being met in a timely manner because of the lack of certified staff we now employ. Now when a patient rings their call light and an office staff employee answers, they have to dismiss their selves to go find a licensed staff member who may easily be occupied by another patient and unable to attend to the patient in need immediately rather them being able to help the patient themselves.
The first day this change was in effect we