SHS Podcast: Customer Service – Student Health Services
[Narrator Voice #1]: Howdy and welcome to the TAMUhealth podcast. Conversations about health as it relates to the Texas A&M student. Brought to you by Student Health Services. You can find us on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram), our handle is @TAMUhealth, and visit our website at shs.tamu.edu. Thanks for tuning in.
[MaleVoice]: Howdy, I’m Dr. Garry Gore with the Beutel Health Center, here on the main campus at Texas A&M. I’m also the campus University EMS Director. We are talking today about customer service at Beutel.
We know a lot about Aggies, and we know a lot about college health issues. The first tentative customer service is know your customer, and we think we do. Many of you may not be aware that we’ve been around since 1876 when the University was first formed, and the first student health center was actually in tents on campus. So, we’ve come a long way and we’ve got a long history of understanding students and their health concerns.
We understand the academic environment here, the rigor, the competition, the stress that it brings, and the importance of staying well to get your work done, to achieve your best and be as successful as you can be. Our motto here is “stay well, do well,” and that’s our goal. We are here to serve you in that regard.
Now, we also understand that college isn’t all work but there’s a lot of play as well, and we understand the social climate that comes with young adults in college. We hear your stories and your concerns every day in the clinic. We know that you might be learning new “life skills” at Northgate on the weekend, or accepting arduous workout challenges at the Rec, or that you might be volunteering long hours for your favorite cause, all of this in addition to studying. We know that new social situations sometimes bring new health challenges and questions that you haven’t encountered before and we’re here to help with what we call the “other” education that students sometimes need while they’re here in college.
As students, you belong to a really diverse and very dynamic group of intelligent and interesting people. As young adults, you share many of the same health concerns – and we specialize in college health. We also know a lot about younger and older patients as well.
So, to us, everybody is a customer. But to you, the most important customer is you. Now, we see about 25,000 individual patients a year, and so we have to appreciate that there are 25,000 individual “you’s” out there who each think that we need to cater to your particular need. And that’s what we’re all about. We see 25,000 individual patients and a total of about 80,000 patient visits. Now to meet those needs, our staff is also just as diverse and very dynamic, intelligent and interesting folks like you.
We come from many backgrounds and we specialize many areas, including family medicine, internal medicine, gynecology, pediatrics, emergency medicine, sports medicine, preventive medicine and psychology. We have a wide range of services here at the clinic to try to meet all those individual needs. Now another thing we know about our customers is we know you would rather be doing something else than coming to the student health center. Our goal is to provide you with efficient, appropriate and
effective care at a convenient campus location at the lowest possible cost to you. So in short, get you in, get you out with a correct diagnosis and an effective cost-conscious treatment plan.
We also know that you come because you are uncertain about your illness or what treatment’s you may need; or perhaps you do know what your illness is and you know the treatment and you just need our help to make it happen.
We know that many of you come with preconceptions about what to expect, and while others of you may come and not have any idea about what to expect. We know that patients are not always right, now I don’t mean that in a derogative way at all, but we understand that you don’t always know what test or medication you may need, even though you have an idea that you need a test or a medication.
Now we know that you don’t always need a Strep test and you don’t always need an antibiotic. A request for a test or a medication may not actually be supported by evidence-based medicine or accepted guidelines for practice. We strive to practice with the highest standard of care, but without needlessly testing or treating with medicines that may not be needed. We take health education seriously, and will offer you our best explanations for our clinical decisions, our testing and our treatment recommendations, and our policies for offering excuses for class and other activities.
Now we know when you come that you want not just good communication, but you want great communication – about your illness, what to expect, your treatment plan, what to do when something unexpected happens after you’ve left us. We know that good communicators make good patients as well as good health care providers.
We also know that you want us, as your care team, to communicate well together– so that your care is coordinated, streamlined and as efficient as possible. We know that you expect us to communicate any delays while that’s here in the clinic, or if there’s going to be a delay in receiving a test result. We want you to know that we’re aware that we sometimes have problems that are beyond our control and that we do everything we can to minimize those and to resolve them as soon as they are recognized. We promise that we will communicate to you what we know and that what we’ll do to resolve an issue as soon as possible.
We’ve had some meetings recently about customer service here at the clinic. It was a general feeling that everyone here at Student Health Services, whether you’re the janitor, or an administrator or somewhere in between, that everyone here helps to care for the patient in some way. Custodial staff keeps the rooms clean and supplies stocked, and we couldn’t do our work unless they did their work. So, we all feel a part of your care. There are other staff members here at A&M that are outside of the health center, for example Physical Plant that keeps the electricity going and the building warm, and we appreciate that there’s a lot of folks outside of Student Health Services that are also contributing to our customer service initiatives here. So from everyone here, we’re all working to care for you as a patient. Now we depend on each other to contribute our part to make your experience a great one, and we know that sometimes you don’t see the most important staff members who are helping to run the clinic behind the scenes to make it more efficient.
Now we know our customers, you, very well because we listened to you in the past. When you asked for same-day appointments, we gave it to you, and you can most often get a same-day appointment if you request it. Now this is going to be a little bit more difficult very late in the day. Last fall, we were short of
providers and so we had a little bit of trouble getting same-day appointments, but now we’re fully staffed and we can do most appointments same day as requested. Now, we have some appointments available all day long. You can schedule online for appointments, about 16 hours in advance of when that appointment becomes available. So, those appointments open up throughout the day. So in the very early morning, you can’t schedule an afternoon appointment, but as the day progresses, you can schedule those afternoon appointments. Now to schedule an appointment online, which we recommend, go to shs.tamu.edu. Click on “Current Students” on the menu bar, the “Patient Portal” and “Appointments,” and it’s just a simple step by step process. If you can’t get an appointment online that’s convenient, you can call for an appointment, and if you can’t call, you can walk in. But just be aware that walk-in appointments become a little bit more difficult the later the day progresses. If you arrive late in the afternoon, say after 4:30, certainly just before 5:00pm, a triage nurse will evaluate you and see if we can see you that late in the afternoon. Some non-emergency or really non-urgent complaints can wait until the next day. We will do our very best to see you, but there are some occasions that we will ask you to come back the following day. We work hard to see as many patients as we can on the same day. Now sometimes we get behind and you may have a bit more of a wait than we’d like. Now this is a problem that’s more common in the afternoon because a lot of students don’t come early in the morning, they sleep in or they go to class and then they show up in the late morning, but particularly around the lunch hour. Now, we have about 15 minutes to see each patient, and sometimes we get behind in seeing a patient because they need a little bit more than what we can do for them in 15 minutes. When we feel we need to go the extra mile to provide patient care, we do, and that may put you a behind a little bit in your appointment schedule, but we do have appointment times during the day that are made for catching up. So, in trying to provide excellent customer service, we want to let you know that we anticipate delays and that we build in time to try and avoid them. Now many delays are caused by patients who arrive just before their scheduled appointment time. We ask everyone to try to arrive 15 minutes before their appointment, and when you don’t, it takes longer for us to get you ready for the appointment, so you appointment time is passing you by, and sometimes it may be eight minutes into a 15 minute appointment before we see you. So we ask you to arrive on time so that you get care on time and we’ll do our very best to avoid any delays.
There are a couple of feature areas of the clinic that I want to point out that I think provide really great customer service that may not always get as much attention. The first is our pharmacy. Simply said, we have great prices and a great pharmacy staff, and we can answer more of your questions and get most of the products that you need. We’re a full service pharmacy and if you have a medical provider outside of campus that wants to write a prescription for you, they can send it to Beutel where you can get better prices in many cases. Now, we don’t accept insurance in the pharmacy, but if our pharmacists believe they can get a better price for you by sending your prescription to a different pharmacy where you can use insurance benefits, they will do that, and so there’s no extra work on your part. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible and to keep the cost as low as possible for you.
Another area I want to focus on is our self-referral labs. Some of you are aware that you can come to the Laboratory here at Beutel and receive testing for several kinds of things, some of the most common are going to be our sexually transmitted illnesses. You don’t have to see a doctor or a provider to come in for testing for HIV, Syphilis, Gonorrhea, or Chlamydia. But, many of you may also not know that you can come in for a blood sugar test, you can get your Cholesterol tested, and you can check for other blood lipids, things like Cholesterol and Triglycerides, kind of a more specific cholesterol test, without seeing the doctor. These are common tests that are often offered at public health screenings, and we make those available for folks if they don’t really feel they need to see a doctor but just want to have baseline
blood testing. There are also quite a few other tests to determine your vaccination status. For example, if you’ve had the Measles, Mumps, Rubella vaccine before and you want to make sure that you are still covered and protected, we offer testing for that as well.
We try very hard to provide top quality medical care here at the clinic, and so we want you to think of us as your first choice when it comes time to see the doctor or nurse practitioner or physician assistant. We have a lot of other services as well, and we hope that you’ll investigate our website to learn more about what we do, what we can do, and be aware that we can refer you to other providers in the community for specialized services that we don’t offer here.
So wrapping up this discussion about customer service, I want to tell you our vision here at Student Health Services is to be your first choice in healthcare and a nationally recognized leader in college health. We are a nationally recognized student health center, and one of the largest campus health centers in the country. But that only inspires us to do more for you and to serve you better. We like to think that we embrace all of the Aggie Core Values as the foundation for what we do, we strive to respect others, we commit to excellence in your healthcare, we engage as leaders in college health, we remain loyal to our mission, we maintain integrity and honesty in our work and in our relationships, and we practice, most importantly, patient-centered selfless service.
Thank you for allowing us to care for you, and if you’ve been here and enjoyed the service, we hope that you’ll tell others. If at any time you think that we’ve fallen short at meeting your expectations for excellent healthcare, we are the ones that need to know. We do see social media posts about people who weren’t happy here at Beutel, and they’ll more often send out a post rather than come here and tell us. So, we want to encourage you if you’ve ever had concerns about what we do here, please let us know so we can have an opportunity to make it better and resolve the issue.
I’m Dr. Garry Gore, and on behalf of all of us at Student Health Services and the Beutel Health Center, thanks again and gig ‘em!
[Narrator Voice #1]: This is a production of TAMU health. Please note that these conversations are never meant to replace your home primary care physician. For any specific health questions, and prior to making a change with your medical care, please discuss with your provider, or come see us at Student Health Services. If you have specific topics for the podcast, you can reach us through social media (TAMUhealth) on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, or send us an email at . More information about the clinic can be found at http://shs.tamu.edu. Thanks and Gig ‘Em!
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