The past month has afforded me a birds-eye view of one of the biggest staff culture-shift games in town, thanks to marathon surgery, a week long stay at Christchurch Hospital last month and multiple out-patient visits since.
Before anyone worries, I'm fine. It was purely cosmetic surgery this time: new breasts to replace the implant reconstruction that failed after I gave up my real ones 18 months ago (family history of breast and ovarian cancer etc etc. There's a lot of it around these days).
Cross fingers these ones will go the distance. I'll be off work until the first week in June to make absolutely sure, but Douglas and the team are keeping the home fires burning. So don't be afraid to sing out if there's anything you need.
It's been a long two years since I made the decision to get rid of my troublesome cancer-prone breasts, but this whole journey has given me an interesting first-hand experience of what it's like to be a consumer in our health system, and a birds-eye view of culture change in action.
It's been long time coming at the DHB, who have been fighting negative headlines and perceptions in a very public and ugly way for years now, and who have very sensibly turned their attention inwards as they look to rehabilitate a pretty badly tarnished reputation.
There's an interesting thing about really meaningful culture change, and it's this: as a consumer or client or patient or whatever you happen to be in that context, you can feel it.
Even if nobody's talking about it publicly yet, even if it's in its nascent stages, you can sense subtle shifts and changes as they happen. And it's really evident at Christchurch Hospital, where all of the rhetoric about putting the patient at the centre of things and really caring about the patient journey etc etc seems to be making a mark.
I first noticed it when my daughter was hospitalised for a week in the middle of last year, at the height of H1N1. The contrast between the children's ward of mid 2009 and what we had experienced in the course of earlier winters was night and day. And that was at the height of the most pressured flu season in living memory.
Change was even more evident in early 2009 when, after my first reconstruction bit the dust, I had to have a permanent IV line, with daily visits to the hospital's infectious diseases department for 6 weeks. The sense of being 'just a number' had been transformed into something altogether different. On both occasions we were acknowledged as real people with real lives. Staff really took the time to take good care of us. There was a real sense of confidence and certainty that the care we were receiving was the best we could get.
That things are changing at Christchurch Hospital is good news for all of us. We only have one hospital, and if we need it, we need it. There is no alternative to the Emergency Department, no other respiratory physician available to my daughter, nowhere else in town to get the sort of intricate, state of the art and incredibly skilled surgery I was fortunate enough to have access to last month, and whose results will (hopefully!) be with me for the rest of my life.
It does nobody any good when a reputation is so damaged that the consumer becomes mistrustful and wary, especially once the negative grows so big, it overwhelms any good that is happening. Valuable time is taken up with questions driven by excessive fear and worry, complaints become more and more consuming. One can only surmise that defensive medicine can't be far behind, as expensive and unnecessarily evasive as it is.
But it's a mistake to think that a reputation can be fixed from the outside in. It never can. That sort of change is always, always an inside out sort of an exercise. And that's just the way it should be.
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