Creating a standard patient complaint management system in Thai private plastic surgery hospital.

Abstract

Healthcare organization such as hospital are finding that simply providing a good health care experience is insufficient to meet patient expectation. Hospitals must train their employees to provide excellent customer service to all patients. Plastic surgery has gained more popularity in recent year and has become one of the most competitive areas in health care market. Customer retention is the one of the most important factors in determining the long-term success of the hospital in competitive plastic surgery market. One way to improve service toward customer-oriented concept to obtain customer satisfaction is via effective customer complaints management. Despite the significant of complaints, companies often disregard complaint management and the area has frequently lacked managerial attention. Lelux hospital, a plastic surgery hospital, is one of the hospitals that need improvement in redesigning existing complaint management system as the hospital is encountering a number of negative complaints posted online. The objectives of the study are to investigate the gap of existing workflow of complaint management system, to identify the current workflow for complaint handling, to provide redesigned work flow for complaint management, and to assess the willingness of adopting a redesigned complaint management practice. The methodology include guided in-depth interview with management team, nurses, physicians, and receptionist. Moreover, workshops were conducted to evaluate current workflow and to gather employees’ ideas and develop redesigned workflow. The results show that even though, there are a lot of areas needed an improvement in current complaint management system, the hospital employees are ready to cooperate to improve their service quality through redesigned complaint management system. More than 70% of the respondents are willing to adopt the redesigned workflow of complaint management. This study allows the company to develop redesigned complaint management system and also provided several recommendations. With improved complaint management system, the service recovery is believed to be improved, which will ultimately improve patient satisfaction and patient retention rate.