MORE than 70 nurses from the South East Regional Health Authority (SERHA) have been trained in customer service since the start of the year.

The training is being undertaken as an ongoing initiative of the training unit of the human resources department at SERHA — one aimed at equipping nurses across the region with adequate skills to complement patient care with quality customer service. More than 300 nurses have benefited from this training since the initiative began in 2008.

Cadein Madden Bennett, SERHA’s training manager, said the south-east region has been working assiduously to ensure that the technical staff is not only clinically competent, but also proficient in a number of critical areas, such as customer service, supervisory management, stress management, data operations, and social graces.

“Our main goal is to ensure that our patients are satisfied with the level of care they receive in our facilities and so we have incorporated customer service into the areas targeted for training because customer service is an integral part of our job and should not be seen as an extension of it,” she said in a release to Career & Education.

“Undeniably, patients rely on our nurses to provide comfort and compassion as they go through the healing process. Therefore, the customer service training is designed to empower the nurses to create a customer-oriented environment and a culture of service excellence where patients feel comfortable and want to be treated in our facilities,” she added.

The topics covered during the two-week course, which culminated last month, include communication in the workplace, handling telephone calls, working effectively in a business environment, organising work priorities and development, preparing for work, providing quality customer care and receiving visitors.

Madden Bennett said the feedback from nurses who participated in the training programme has been positive.

“The training evaluation questionnaire filled out by the nurses at the end of the programme indicate that they were very pleased with the training they received and that they thought that it was relevant (and) geared towards improving the level of service provided to patients,” she said. “The next step is to evaluate how the participants have applied the training as they serve patients in their respective institutions.”

SERHA provides health care services to 47 per cent of the Jamaican population through a network of 10 hospitals and 89 health centres in Kingston and St Andrew, St Catherine and St Thomas. Five of the 10 hospitals are specialist facilities, catering for maternity, paediatric, psychiatric, oncology and thoracic patients.