Mickey Mouse and Cinderella in hospitals?

"All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them."

-Walt Disney-

Disney cartoons are always my childhood favorite and they never fade from my memories of my childhood! I still remember that when I was small, my parents always bought me the videotape (when there was no CD or VCD yet) of Disney cartoons, like Mickey Mouse, Lion King, Cinderella, Jungle Book and etc. I always watched it with my brother over and over again that we never got bored. Until today, I think my parents are still keeping them even though all the tapes are spoiled and obsolete. That's my childhood.

But have you ever imagined that Mickey Mouse and Cinderella are coming to hospitals?

Well, I came across an article from the actuarial blog that I'm following and I thought it would be interesting to share with the readers out there. The article is about the hiring of Disney consultants by hospital management teams.

I was surprised that Walt Disney Co. has been providing consulting services to hospitals and other industries for around 20 years. Undoubtedly, guest service and their customers' satisfaction are always the top emphasis of Disney company. That is probably why the hospital managements are willing to spend thousands of money to send their employees to Disney just for training on how to best serve their customers, which are the patients.

According to the article, the employees of hospitals are trained to think creatively, to behave appropriately at different situations and to understand the need of a patient. In fact, what the patients want is not just good clinical care, but also they need attention from the doctors and nurses.

As said in the article, the visits of Disney consultants to hospitals have made huge changes: from the appearance of the hospitals to the outlook of their employees, to the policies in management and hiring process. All these changes in management are said to be important in shaping excellent customer service because customers are always in their top priority and their customers should be taken care of even at the parking lots.

However, this was criticized by the public that the hiring of Disney consultants is a waste of money as the training for hospital employees from a company which is well known of theme parks seems to be inappropriate and the money from taxpayers should be invested wisely in other facilities, like the clinical care or the research in new medicine.

In regards to this article, I personally think that hiring Disney consultants could be advantageous to the hospital management since this could help to increase the quality of customer service in hospitals. I had bad experience in clinics here that the receptionist was just not very friendly to me. That was my first time visiting the clinics and I did not know the procedure of making appointments. So I asked the receptionist but she just seemed to ignore me. When I asked for a few times, she literally shouted at me. This was really terrible. Since Disney has good management in customer service, I think it's best to spend some money to have the hospital employees to learn the ways on how to best serve their customers. However, it might seem inappropriate to send the hospital employees for training at Disney theme parks since the setting and the customers are totally different from the hospitals. There will also be a limited number of employees being sent for training since the cost will be very high. But having consultants at the hospitals could be more helpful since they could provide consulting service to the management at anytime whenever it's needed and more employees could be trained.