“Care Factor’ Vital in Every Sector
The last 10 weeks has ushered in some major changes & challenges in my own personal life. In this time frame my Dad has been diagnosed with kidney failure and has gone from living independently with my Mum in Yeppoon to a constant care situation in hospital. My Mum subsequently wore herself out with daily visits to see my Dad and ended up in hospital as well.
My Mum in particular was previously able to take care of anything ‘medical’ as she had been a nursing sister herself and was always a wealth of help and kindness for as long as I can remember back to my early childhood. Now suddenly, I have had to take a proactive role in their health care and am setting up under my house to home care both of them from this weekend on.
Out of all of the stress and craziness of these last 10 weeks one of the things that has hit home with me are the parallels that I see between the health industry and what we do with computers. We go to hospitals when a health problem has become too great for us to deal with ourselves. People bring their computers to us for fixing when an IT problem is beyond their level of computer expertise.
I have experienced firsthand the need to depend on another individual to sort something that is beyond my control and the need to have faith in their abilities, however this level of faith varied considerably between doctors and hospitals. There have been several doctors that I have had to deal with lately that have instilled zero faith and also just a few marvellous individuals at the opposite (positive) end of this scale.
Across the board the resounding differences seem to come back to what many would refer to as the ‘care factor’. It has been care factor that principally determined our level of faith and trust and this has differed between nurses, between doctors and right through to hospital administrators.
Everyone is ‘busy’ today due to the high cost of wages, due to funding cuts, due to bad economic times and there are less people to do more work in nearly every industry. This comes with a great risk of not completing tasks or jobs to a satisfactory level. I have seen all too often things go pear shaped due to a lack facilities and sometimes just due to a lack of care and this is especially true of our industry.
In fixing a broken computer or setting up a new one we can configure a thousand settings but for the sake of one missed tick in a box the PC can fail to work to the customers’ expectations. We have been part of some of the large building projects around CQ and have again seen firsthand when companies supplying other services to a project don’t portrait any sign of care factor.
It doesn’t matter if you are throwing millions of dollars at a project or if you enlist professionals with a string of letters behind their name or if you hire the ‘biggest’ names in a particular industry if the ‘care factor’ is not there you will have disasters. I have always drilled my own team of technicians about the need to show care with each and every job and my recent experience with the medical industry has strengthened my conviction in this area.
When you are dealing with a tradie or a professional or a service industry or a major company and you don’t perceive a reasonable ‘care factor’ in place then my advice is to go somewhere else.
Future Byte Me topics can be emailed to [email protected] and Bruce is contactable at Kerr Solutions, 205 Musgrave Street or on 49 222 400.
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