Although some do, perhaps a lot of people don’t yet realise how much the world is being changed by the extent to which the whole world can get to know much more accurately what people and organisations are really like, how they really operate, through emails, blogs, websites and so on – and that this can be brought about through the efforts of individual people people and organisations with very limited resources.
As an illustration of this, one of us had this experience four or five weeks ago, quite outside of the world of medical services.
“Recently I had a very poor experience in a Coles store. On the receipt I got it had, “Did you enjoy your shop at Coles XXXX. Head over to www.tellcoles.com.au and tell us about your experience! Your store manager is: XXXX.”
So I went over to www.tellcoles.com.au. All I wanted to do was send them a six to eight line email, but I found that the only thing I could do was fill in a questionnaire in which I was supposed to comment on every nook and cranny of their business, which took at least 20 minutes to complete, and unless I completed it, I couldn’t send it! They asked for my email address so they could respond. But 4 or 5 weeks later I haven’t heard anything – nothing to indicate that my 20 minutes of hard work hadn’t gone straight into the rubbish bin, which it probably had.”
We don’t think that in five years time, or perhaps less, that Coles will be doing things this way – they will have realised that too many people have become aware, or will become aware, of what they’re really like that doing things this way is completely idiotic.
This is another example, this time from within the world of medical services.
On the 14 Mar 2015 we wrote to Kieran Pehm, the NSW Health Care Complaints Commissioner, with a complaint that a NSW doctor, Dr Jassim Daood was making claims about his qualifications and memberships that couldn’t be substantiated. Eventually we got a letter dated 5 Jun 2015, (amazingly quickly for the HCCC, in our experience,) telling us that our complaint had been dismissed because Dr Daood had provided “documentation” that had led the “Commission and the Council, (the Medical Council of NSW,) to be “satisfied that Dr Daood’s claims in relation to his qualification and memberships are warranted and appropriate” – this included a claim by Dr Daood that he was a Fellow of an impressive sounding organisation that turned out to not even exist!
This didn’t particularly surprise us as we’d been getting complete and utter rubbish like this from Kieran Pehm and his HCCC for years.
But something must have changed, because without us sending them too much additional material, they decided to have a review, and today we got a letter dated 21 Sep 2015, telling us that, “During the review, attempts to independently verify some of Dr Daood’s claims were unsuccessful.”
As far as we’re concerned, there’s no way in the world that anything like this would have happened five years ago. Perhaps some of the HCCC people were thinking that they were coming over to the world as just too silly.