Hospitality Industry: Achieving great outcomes from services

In an earlier blog I referred to the lessons KinCare can learn from the Logistics, Health and Hospitality industries as we continue to strive for finding ways to serve our clients better. The Hospitality industry shows us how we can focus on delivering a great experience to our clients and customers. The Health industry shows us how we need to be accountable for the outcomes that we produce.  I’d like to expand on this issue in this blog.

Hospitality Industry

At the present time in the Community Care industry, many of our systems are built around delivering outputs.  We are usually questioned by various government departments, partner organisations and our clients about how many houses we clean, how many hours of service we have delivered, how many wounds we have dressed, and so on.

It is important to measure this quantitative data, as it does demonstrate what and how many services we are providing, but we still need to know about the quality of our services, and whether the services we provide are helping clients achieve great outcomes. Every interaction we have with a client impacts their life. Just like in the hospitality industry, we need to think through every contact we have with our clients or customers, so that we can learn how to make each interaction a positive contribution to their lives.

We need to know how our clients feel about:

• what they are able to achieve
• their standard of living
• how healthy they are
• their degree of independence
• how safe and secure they feel
• how connected they feel to others in their family and community

We need to understand the experience our clients have had with our service. We aim to help people improve their quality of life. Are our services helping to achieve that? Have we let someone down? Are there things we need to improve?

When it comes to how people feel sometimes it can seem difficult to measure, but it is not impossible to measure these things – as the hospitality industry has shown.  There are many tools developed that allow qualitative information to be collected and then presented so that we can learn and improve in the work that we do with clients and customers in hospitality industry.

KinCare’s approach is to include these tools as standardised quality assessments that are an integral part of our assessment and care planning process so that important information about how our clients feel about our services, and how they can be improved, is simple to collect.  The data collected from these tools allows us to assess the outcomes we achieve against the general population, and change our services to get the best possible result for our clients.

These tools also allow us to learn what has the greatest impact for our clients. This information is then incorporated into the care planning process (while still allowing space for the professional judgement of our staff) to provide a consistent and effective approach to the development of our care plans.  Our care plans can include specific time limited client goals. This provides higher levels of accountability as we follow up whether goals have been achieved in partnership with our clients and their families.

The feedback is also incorporated in other ways. It helps us make improvements to our systems, to improve the training we provide to our staff, and to keep challenging ourselves with opportunities to do things better for hospitality industry.

So what are we hearing now? We have just recently implemented new assessment and care planning systems so results are still preliminary. In most services and for most of our clients the general feedback we are receiving is very pleasing. However, we are also identifying some clients where our services are not achieving the results and standards we aspire to. Please feel free to share your experience with me through this blog or by mailing me. I will publish a selection of the feedback here on my blog. I will ensure that all positive and negative feedback we receive is acknowledged and that our team contacts you to find solutions if there are issues you need addressed.

We maintain high levels of accountability to help us ensure that every intervention with our clients adds something positive to their sense of well being and their quality of life.