My perspective on a business filled with humanity and desire to help. Help those who sometimes find it hard to say what hurts them.
Administrators
At one point in September 2022, I was left with only one administrator in the children’s clinic. Its total area is 1100 sqm, it has 2 front desks and many patients and their parents and companions. Three cash desks, two legal entities.
How did we get here?
In general the administrators are three. One of them left at the beginning of the summer, but I was busy chasing better and better quarterly results and I took no action. I was left with two administrators plus the head administrator, and they were all great. They were well-trained and had great attitude towards all visitors. All tasks seemingly took care of themselves, even some entirely marketing tasks were handled by them. They worked with passion and desire. And suddenly one of them left. Perhaps the person who was most engaged in the process. She had the perfect explanation - she wanted to continue her studies abroad.
This is how I ended up with only one administrator. However, it never rains, but it pours and almost simultaneously the two administrators from the clinic at Rakovski also left. So I was left with one administrator at the children's clinic and one (my main administrator) at the adult clinic. We closed one of the front desks in the children’s clinic and for a long time we forgot about real customer service. Greeting and seating visitors in the waiting room, taking coats, offering drinks – it was all gone. The attitude towards customers which we were so famous for and which we had fought for, collapsed in an instant. The sole receptionist was barely able to make payments and record follow-up appointments. We also started to lag behind with the calls for regular hygiene visits. We had worked so hard to teach the children and their parents about its importance, we were committed to reminding them, and suddenly...
A real active search for new people started, but if you have recently been on the lookout for a person for a certain position, you know.
There are no people to do the job!
The ones that do come for an interview in most cases are not suitable. They have endless demands, but they are not ready to meet any requirements. I heard many times:
An extremely difficult period during which we had many interviews and trial days. We hired and fired so many people that I can't remember their names. We had appointments to start work which were not kept, declined at the very last moment, phones that were switched off.
In the end, I think we overcame all this. We now have a full team of administrators, nice, hard-working and friendly girls, we even opened our second front desk.
What happened, I wonder today, why did we go through this?
I just didn't see the storm, I didn't recognize it. What initially seemed like a simple change of an employee with another, turned out be a fundamental crisis. It brought us a lot of problems, messed visits and lost revenue. And most importantly, we discredited the clinic in the eyes of our patients and their parents.
The solution? For me it is prevention of future crises. How can this happen? By creating and actively working with a database of people who are right for the job.
