Compassion and people skills in excellent healthcare practice

Qualities of a Healthcare Professional

With several family members hospitalized for various reasons over the past few years, I have had ample exposure to a large number of healthcare professionals. Almost without exception, they were knowledgeable and very skilled at what they did, from the doctors to the nurses and even to the orderlies and volunteers. What really set apart the excellent healthcare professionals from the merely skilled was the level of service they provided. I do not mean to imply that hospitals should be at all akin to hotels, but understanding that a job in the healthcare industry is at its most basic and profound levels a job concerned with people makes the difference between providing excellent service and that which is merely medically adequate.

The primary job in healthcare is, of course, to improve the medical condition of the patients treated. But treating them with extra kindness and a commitment to improving not only to their medical condition but to their personal comfort, as much as possible, can go along way in improving the patient's experience of treatment. By reducing stress levels, this could even have a direct medical benefit. It is essential that a healthcare professional be knowledgeable and efficient, but to make them truly excellent they need to have good people skills, too.