For the last 2 days we have met, chatted, planned and ate our
way through our CMPT Annual General Meeting.
Twelve months of awareness, 6 months of meeting planning, 1 month of
getting details into place and 2 days of presentations and questions and answers
and stress, and it is over… for another year. Would someone please pass the
Advil.
The gist of the meeting with all the pretty graphs and
Management Report is available on line for all to see at www.CMPT.ca check in the left hand
margin and click on Annual Report.
As much as I stress over this annual event, having now done
it for many years, I have to say that I can’t envision running any operation
without it. I am a little surprised that
ISO90001 talks about Management Review (which is a good thing) and setting
Goals and Objectives (and that too is a good thing), but is silent on the
importance and value of an AGM. AGMs
bring all the players into a single room and create a moment in time to discuss
strengths and weakness, and the opportunities and threats (a SWOT conversation!).
CMPT is actually in pretty good shape; we have new digs –
good clean and open space, and we have resources and interested partners. I can’t think of any time in our 31 year
history when things have been better, keeping in mind we are still working with
governments determined to shave medical laboratories slowly out of existence. But as long as patient safety is considered a
priority, quality and quality assessment will be central to whatever
laboratories do exist. So we are likely
to survive in some form or another, provided that we can keep one step ahead,
and focus more on the future than on the past.
This year we had for the first time some lessons to be
learned which are displayed on our composite customer satisfaction score. A visit to the Annual Report will show what I
mean.
We have created a unique composite satisfaction
score that is based on survey results, written comments, complaints, and
contracts and consultations. The score
has an intentional negative bias.
Positive findings have positive multipliers of (+5) while negative
findings have negative multipliers of (-10 or -25 or -100). The point is to allow negative comments and
complaints to dramatically drive our score downward. For the first time since 2002 this downward
pressure actually kicked in the current year.
This was primarily due to a survey of users’ opinions of our
web-site as a method for data entry. As
much as the site scored very high on Quality and Usefulness, Navigation was
seen as problematic, and Ease of data entry was not very good; lots of not so
positive comments.
I suspected this was going to happen, and my suspicions bore
out. I guess if we had wanted our
satisfaction score to indicate that everyone was happy with everything that we
did, we could have picked another topic for our survey, but what’s the point of
the exercise. At least this way we know
and have documented that we have a problem that needs to be addressed. And so now we will. And that is a good outcome.
For us the bottom line is that Quality Management is a risky
process. When we look for problems we
find them and then we have to deal with them.
Better to bring this out to the open than to let them sit in the
background and fester until the whole program falls apart in one inglorious
cloud of smoke.
We are a very small not-for-profit service provider that has
impact on patient care and medical services across Canada. If we are not prepared to focus on Quality, then
it becomes pretty hollow for us to make demands and expectations on
others.
So the planning for next years’ meeting has already
begun.
I invite you to visit www.CMPT.ca
