Aubmc Medical Center Essay

Hospitals, like any other business or enterprise, aim to accomplish a high-quality service for its patients in order to gain their satisfaction. For the last years, AUBMC created its own 2020 vision that focuses on patient satisfaction in order to improve operations and service requirements at the medical center. However, AUBMC faced several issues that left the patient unsatisfied with the service, one of which was its transport within the medical center. Patient transport is one of the most important parts in medical centers and is essential for an efficient and successful function of all departments. It plays a major role in the patients’ judgment of the hospital services since it’s the first point of contact between patients and
the hospital and therefor it’s the first thing that patients judge to evaluate the overall service. Any malfunction in the process can have several negative impacts on the satisfaction of both the patient and its family, as well as staffs’ productivity, and leads to a delay in operations and procedures in the medical center. AUBMC witnessed a rise in the complaints from both the patients and the staff about patient transport.
One of the main problem in patient transport is the lack and the limited number of porters compared to the size of the medical center; this caused a long waiting period for the patients to be transported to a specific destination and a huge workload assigned to each person in the transport team which covers the 2 buildings that make the medical center (exhibit 4), the basement, and the auxiliary building 56. In addition to the limited number of porters, their inaccurate distribution over the departments is a main factor that caused the aggravation of the problem (Exhibit 3 shows inaccurate distributions of porters, for example one orderly in OR may not be enough). Some departments require more porters than others; the wrong distribution assigned some of them to departments that are not as much in need as the others. Moreover, the complexity of the transport service (exhibit 5) and the availability of only 4 elevators formed an obstacle that slowed the process down and reduced the productivity (The more complex a process is, the more time it is spent on it to be accomplished). Furthermore, the mismanagement of the distribution of tasks among staff that was exposed when the instance of double booking appeared (the porter reached its destination to find out that the transport request had been accomplished by someone else) and the fact that there was a number of
transport jobs that was left unattended aggravated the problem. Patient transport issues are distinctive in that they cover most units and departments and have an effect on patient satisfaction since it affects most of the patient related process. AUBMC hopes to overcome those issues in its 2020 vision and is focusing on improving the service quality and reaching their goals (shown in exhibit 6) that seeks customers’ satisfaction.