Public Hospital in Vietnam

Table of content

I/ Introduction to the service failure

II/ Problem identifying

III/ Analysing the problem

IV/ Solution and realistic service improvement

V/ References

I/ Introduction of the service failure

Before flying to Australia, I have experienced the health service in one of the biggest Vietnamese public hospitals. There are several problems in the service such as the waiting line was too long, and patients have to comply with lots of paperwork before receiving appropriate medical treatment, paying procedures were complicated and overlapping, the waiting time between examinations and testing are reaching 300 minutes per patient.

The reality in public health care service in Viet Nam: According the Vietnam Ministry of health, the average length of time for a patient's medical examination was 340 minutes, of which, the duration of contact with the medical staff was 40 minutes, the waiting time was 300 minutes. Accordingly, from the time of procedure to the time of examination is 1 hour 25 minutes. From the time it is indicated, the test to the test is 65 minutes. Waiting time for test results is 2 hours 30 minutes. From the result to the return to see the doctor is 40 minutes.

II/ Problem identifying

The first problem is failed to manage the capacity to cope with the demand, leads to long waiting line and customer dissatisfaction. On the other hand, the waiting area is lack of seats and spaces; patients are stressed out by crying sound from babies, noises from other patients… Second, the lack of doctors and medical staffs also lead to the fact that patients from rural areas have to travel a long distance to reach hospitals in major cities is also one of the factors that lead to an overload reality in public hospitals. Third, the outdated and old information system is creating huge obstacles and errors in managing and accessing medical record as well as patient information.

III/ Analysing the problems

From the business-to-consumer perspective, long waiting queue and unknown waiting time disappointing the customers and make them angry, exhausted, resulting in a sharp decrease in customer satisfaction, causing frustration for patients in the lobby. It occurs when demand exceeds capacity and bottleneck status happen in the process (Fitzsimmons, 2014), in which all of the hospital facilities are utilized but still cannot solve the problem of too many waiting patients. Moreover, when it comes to waiting for a service consist of several stages like the hospital, patients often feel empty and unoccupied, which is very awful and keep them from other productive activities (Fitzsimmons, 2014). There are cases where patients queue for early morning but still have to wait hours before receiving medical treatment. Capacity overload, shortage of experienced doctor and medical equipment, limited information technology application in managing customer information are primary factors that cause the problem. Patients have to return many times has caused the waiting time to expand, causing troubles for ill patients, especially young children and the elderly.

Regarding governmental prospect, overload situation in hospital leads to traffic disorder and congestion around the hospital area. Every day from "dusk till dawn," the taxi stops in a long queue, in front of hospital gate, motorbike, motorcycle taxi, street vendor "ragged" as the area becomes cluttered. Especially, outside the hospital entrance is truly a "hot spot" in the afternoon, there are many patients from the hospital go out to buy food and essential items, making the traffic becomes even worse, directly affects the safety of people traveling from inside out of the hospital.

With reference to customer expectation, normally when it comes to queue in a hospital lounge, patients often expect less waiting time and more careful examination and treatment. According to the queuing psychology, people want to get started immediately when they arrive, plus the anxiety also makes wait seems longer, all of these factors create a chaos emotion that patients are suffered from. When long waiting lines exist in hospital, it may increase the risk of increasing customer satisfaction rate and declining patient health outcome. Angry customers can turn their back on the hospital, maybe turn into a competitor, these clients can even be lost forever. On the other hand, people only notice waits much longer or much shorter than they expected which is based on the prior experience they have had with the facility plus the service promise. Also, they often observe the number of people in the waiting line to estimate the expected waiting time. Consequentially, service speed is less important than their position in the waiting line. Besides, their perception in waiting cost depends mostly on their waiting time; it usually forms a thought of the service providers did not value customer's time. Before starting to shorten the length of the waiting line, hospital's administrator should use strategies to stretch out stress from patients by providing reading lounge, artwork, live entertainment to distract the patients from the waiting time. Moreover, a hospital can create different types of events such as free product testing booths form different companies or conducting a survey with small gifts for patients who participated. These actions can both benefit the hospital and patients at the same time by releasing the stress and create opportunities for patients to try out new products. It's also an effective way to marketing products to consumers.

Turning to the central operation management, long-queue phenomenon has existed for quite a long time because of many factors, such as administration, management in human resources… There are three main philosophies in managing hospital including Traditional, Human Relations and Human resources (Tonges & Das, 1995). Most of the public hospitals in Vietnam are using the Traditional philosophy, which entails highly centralized decision-making and close supervision and control, but because of the distinctive character of the medical profession, especially when decisions are made based on specialized knowledge, it will take times because decisions making process need to get permissions from senior manager rather than doctors can act on behalf of themselves. There has to be an orientation to the Human Resources, which associated with decentralized decision-making designed to actualize employees' potential to contribute to enhanced organizational effectiveness to save more time for the whole hospital.