There are those who are total professionals about everything they do and are always striving to be the best they can be (most of our clients are in that category). “Competition” in their area is merely a reason for them to strive to deliver the highest quality service and learn more and better ways to take care of their patients or clients.
And then there are the others who want to merely do the irreducible minimum amount of effort and just get by. They complain about the “recession” that no one else is aware of except others of a similar mind, about the competition being too great, and so on.
Rising Above the Competition
In order to rise above the competition, you need to first do a very critical analysis of every aspect of your practice, not only from the healthcare professional standards view but also from the patient or client’s view.
To rise above the competition, it might be interesting to hear from patients or clients what they did and didn’t like about other practices they have been to. If you’re brave enough (and you must push yourself to be), you should ask them also what about your practice is lacking or needs improvement. It is, after all, the patients and clients that you are striving to give the ultimate in quality service to.
To do these surveys, you should have 2 or 3 different people ask the written set of questions of the patients or clients. Select 2 people each per day that they will ask and they must write down the answers as exactly as possible. If the person complains about anything, acknowledge very thankfully and tell them that is why you are doing the survey in order to improve the quality of service to them.
Meet and Discuss
Once you have surveyed at least 50 patients, and have the results in hand, you should tabulate all the results and see what the common elements are as far as things people love and hate and would like to see improved.
Then hold a team meeting and work out how to remedy the negatives and how to implement the positives. There may be several solutions or ideas for each item that you want to work on and so try to take the ones that are the easiest to fix and see if that works before going for the more complicated solutions.
This self-assessment or self-analysis is a healthy action to take from time to time to ensure that your practice is the best it can possibly be.
Raise the bar for the other practices in your area!
