For the past year or so I’ve been giving acupuncture treatments to staff at a hospital. I was introduced to their employee assistance program director via a nurse who had gotten good results at my office. It has been a “fun” learning experience, if you can call dealing with hospital staff’s pain fun. Here’s a 2-parter about that experience so far. This one deals with the administrative part as much as I was involved.
I typed up a simple proposal for the director to present to the board of directors. She said it was a bit of a formality but still important to explain what was happening in their hospital. Easy enough. I asked for 4 hour sessions, biweekly. I figured I would be able to catch some morning people and some afternoon people. I told them all I needed were a space and chairs and that I would pack in and out everything I needed. I figured I needed to be as low maintenance as possible, giving the board as few reasons as possible to say no for legal, health, and compliance reasons.
There was a little bit of education that had to happen about community acupuncture. Luckily the director had experience with acupuncture so making the jump to affordability and accessibility via communal treatment setting was easy. Actually, the whole process of getting in there as a community acupuncture practitioner was pretty easy since her concern was simply giving the employees options. It seemed she was already on acupuncture’s side, and just needed to jump through the hoops the hospital had in place.
Once the approval came in—which took 2-3 weeks from what I remember—getting the word out about a new program became an issue. Due to changed corporate policies, email messages/reminders were out of the question for almost the entire year I’ve been there (until very recently). So I went to several internal health fairs. I answered questions, gave quick consults, and most of all placed ear seeds for stress. It was fast, easy, and drew attention since there was a line of people waiting for something. If there’s a line, it must be something cool, no? At these events I collected the internal emails from the staff who were interested and handed them off to the employee assistance program director.
Since I’m a visitor to the hospital, these health fairs were my only presence outside of the actual treatment sessions. They went well, but didn’t really do much for attendance. It has gone up and down, as low as 1 in a 4 hour session to as high as 18. Remember that these numbers were achieved (as much as 1 person in 4 hours can be an achievement) with passive or infrequent announcements: an internal website event posting, direct emails to those that had provided them…and that was it. The internal website is not user friendly as staff have reported. And the emails, although useful, were lost in the constant expansion of their inboxes and directed only at those who had provided them at the health fairs.
With a few sessions under my belt, word of mouth was good but still ineffectual; there was no consistency in attendance. Feedback was positive, including 1 person who told the director that she was not going to on-site massage so that she could come to the acupuncture session. That made me feel good, but I needed to know if I was doing a good enough job to fit into the busy schedules of hospital staff as well as if there were any complaints. I wanted to clarify if the spotty attendance was my fault. She said no, it wasn’t.
Although she tried to get me in the same room so that staff could find me easily, I have moved around some. I’m finally being assigned to a conference room area consistently, rotating through rooms but all in the same area. And with a recent policy change, the director can now email everyone, meaning that all those who wanted to go to a session but didn’t know when they were happening could receive a reminder. This last part is important because this move alone brought in a fair amount of new people, none of whom I had the emails for. And hopefully the new permission will help increase and stabilize the numbers of people who attend the sessions.
In regards to the administrative part of this experience it’s been about patience. I’ve been in consistent communication with the director about how to improve attendance as well as making sure the staff was happy with the experience. At all times she said that the “marketing” could only happen internally. My hands were tied. I started just as email permission became restrictive and have lasted until some of those restrictions have been released. The eased email rules have come just in time because with such poor attendance the previous sessions I was about to reduce the frequency of the sessions down to 1/month or just cut them. The 1 thing I will likely change anyways is the length of sessions. Making a tighter 2 or 3 hours seems to make a reasonable difference in keeping the flow of things. I’ll talk of the actual treatments in the next post.
