TMCH is specialty hospital. Patients from all over India come here to consult. The corridors of TMCH are always full of patients, mostly standing, in varying degrees of suffering, with accompanying relatives, waiting to consult doctors for tests or treatments.
Murli had taken his mother to TMCH to consult Dr. Rao, who advised her to come the next day for some tests. She was asked to get four tests done. One of these was Biopsy.
For each of the first three tests, she had to go to the specific test room, where the nurse prepared the receipt, which had to be taken to the cashier and brought back with cashier’s signature before the test could be done. There were queues for getting the receipt, for paying cash and having the test done. Murli’s mother waited at one place while Murli stood in queues in each time.
The test rooms and the cashier were on the ground floor, but the laboratory was on the seventh floor of an adjacent building. The receipt has to be brought down to the cashier and taken back to laboratory. There were queues for the lifts too.
Murli spent about three hours waiting in the queues. The tests hardly took 45 minutes. All the while his mother was alone in the crowded corridor. When he mentioned this experience to Dr. Rao, and wondered what patients without healthy relatives did, Dr. Rao smiled and said, ‘they manage’.
Questions:-
1) ‘It is not only important to deliver a quality service but also it is important how the service is delivered.’ Comment with the reference of the above case.
2) Bring out the tangibility, empathy and responsiveness of the staff and the hospital in this case.
3) Bring out the importance of ‘process’ in the hospital services.
4) If you were the administrator how would you ‘map’ the services of TMCH.
(Case Study of Service Sector Management May 2005)
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