Improving patients’ experience in hospitals necessitates the improvement of service quality. Using mystery patients as a tool for assessing and improving patients’ experience is praised for its comprehensiveness. However, such programs are costly, difficult to design and may cause unintended negative consequences if poorly implemented. Following an Action Research theoretical framework, the aim of this study is to utilize the Mystery Patient (MP) for engaging the patient in co-creating valuable non-clinical services and producing guidance about future managerial interventions. This was operationalized at the Outpatient Clinics at a large Academic Hospital in the Middle East region whereby 18 Mystery Patients conducted 66 visits to clinics and filled out 159 questionnaires. The results indicated higher scores on hard criteria or skills (technical), such as personal image and professionalism, and lower scores on soft criteria (interpersonal), including “compassion” and “courtesy”. The data also demonstrated how the MP tool could provide targeted information that can point to future interventions at any one of the patient experience core pillars, namely: process, setting, and employees. This paves the way for another cycle of spiral learning, and consequently, a continuous process of organizational learning and development around service provision. The MP tool can play the role of the catalyst that accelerates the value co-creation process of patient experience by directing management to necessary interventions at the three pillars of patient experience: employees, processes, and setting.
O ne of th e im portant areas within the research program m e of the Brem en In stitute of Industrial Technology and Applied Work Science (B IBA) is oriented towards the study of production technology. A particular dom ain is devoted to the m an ufactu ring of one-of-a-kind products for th e m aritim e industry. Th e paper describes a case study of a successful application of structured m ethods for m odelling th e sh ip predesign process. An essential provision of this study was an investigation of predesign practices perform ed by various shipyards. The BRITE -EURA M Project BE 4227.90 ArgoShip' focused on the overall im provem en t of the sh ip predesign process. Q uality m an agem ent has been identi® ed as an essential m easure for ensuring the ful® lm ent of customer requirem en ts. The paper describes concepts showing how quality m an agem en t can be im plem en ted within th e predesign process. For this process, a reference m odel as an integrated approach to the ship predesign has been speci® ed. The m odel is based on a com bination of selected structured techniques.
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