Home Sweet Home
When we talk about becoming a “healthcare home” we don’t mean that we’re going to build a clinic with bedrooms and a big family room with a pool table and an entertainment center. We mean that we want to create a place that feels like a home--a place that feels like family.
The upsides to this approach are obvious and many. When patients feel cared for and known, they are more loyal, more trusting, more satisfied and much more engaged in their healthcare. When we and our staff feel cared for and known, we are more joyful, more engaged, more collaborative and a lot more effective. This vision of a big, happy healthcare family in a joyful healthcare home is something all of us would love to have. Why, then, is it so hard to create? And why does “healthcare home” so often end up as an empty promise--a slogan to put up on the billboards and the website--instead of a reality?
The alternative to a healthcare home is a healthcare business. Over the last few decades, with the decline of the small private practice and the rise of giant healthcare corporations, this has become the dominant model in our industry. It’s not about family--it’s about the exchange of services for money. It’s about transactions.
No one thinks this healthcare model works very well. Patients feel dehumanized and disrespected. Employees feel like replaceable cogs in a machine. But the system does what it was designed to do, and it does it well. It makes money. And because we all know that it’s a transactional system, we treat it like one. We don’t expect caring or loyalty or trust, so we don’t get upset when those things are missing. We only expect to get what we pay for--no more and no less.
This gets to the heart of why creating a healthcare home is so difficult. If you want people to feel like family, you have to treat them that way. And once you start, you can’t just stop. Once you establish that a relationship is based on caring, to withhold that caring is a profound betrayal. To refuse to see a patient because they missed their bus and showed up late becomes like locking the door when your cousin is late for Thanksgiving dinner. To refuse to accommodate an employee’s need to breast pump during their shift becomes like telling your sister-in-law she can’t feed her newborn in your house.
If we want to become a healthcare home, we have to treat the people in that home like family. This is a fundamental change in the relationships that connect us. Each one is a social contract, not a business transaction. The payoff is huge, but so is the commitment. And if we can’t deliver on that commitment, then we should think twice before we make it.
