Column: Try a little kindness

Our home life was a mirror image of the old television show, “Leave it to Beaver.” My belief system was firmly suspended between my mother’s Quaker/Presbyterian commitment to mankind and my Father’s Catholic commitment to the Golden Rule. Suffering was not something that we wanted to see other people endure.

Mom’s philosophy was to raise her boys to be kind, to help our elderly neighbors, to visit the sick, bury the dead, and donate whatever we could. In fact, that came from the John Wesley Rule of Life: “Do all the good you can, By all the means you can, In all the ways you can, In all the places you can, At all the times you can, To all the people you can, As long as ever you can.”

Consequently, when I became the CEO of a hospital in 1997, I had two very real drivers that were pushing me. The first was that of making a difference. The other was to try to do that as a good guy.

One can’t fully appreciate just how unhealthy being a healthcare administrator can be until you’re in that position. It’s not bad enough that you’re dealing everyday in life and death resource allocation decisions, but there are also about 40 plus regulatory agencies looking over your shoulder, hundreds of stakeholders in the form of physicians, nurses, other employees, peers, competitors, board members, and of course patients and their families, all of whom want your attention or worse. Believe me, no matter how large the organization, the wind blows hard at the top of that pole.

It was a matter of days into my CEO position that I decided to approach life as a Navy Seal or a Kamakize pilot. In fact, for years when I went to work, I kept my signed resignation in my inside suit pocket. I was willing to die on the hill that I had decided to attack, and that hill was kindness. Because healthcare utilized many of the training practices employed in the field by the military, those tactics created the necessary results but sometimes at a high mental and emotional price to those working in the field.

There were plenty of injured bullies in positions of power. Some because of the draconian, Socratic teaching methods that created insensitivity and cruelty, and others from the docs simply being blamed for everything and anything dealt out to the patients by Nature, God, or whatever. Remember, many physicians had been hopelessly bullied as the brainiacs in Junior High School and sometimes, later in life, others in positions of power had to pay the price for that mistreatment.

My first decade in healthcare could easily be described as my “Why?” decade. I couldn’t understand why healthcare employees did many of the things they did. I did understand how callous one could become out of fatalism, and self-protection, and addressed that directly. Consequently, we required sensitivity workshops and training garnered from Disney, Ritz Carlton, Dale Carnegie, and DISC personality profile programs for our hospital staff. Never make your patients leave their dignity at the door.

The most important thing that evolved from my “put on my pants one leg at a time” personality was due to the death of my father who had suffered significantly in a hospital. It caused me to have a deeply inspirational desire to make things better for patients and families.

Now here’s the big secret. I didn’t care what made people better. Don’t get me wrong, proper credentials, evidence-based programs, and measured outcomes were critically important. But my goal was to make patients and their families feel more comfortable.

That concept is called Patient-Centered Care. It was my intent to create the best of a hospital, the best of a hotel, and the best of a spa by adding significant levels of kindness. That’s a powerful philosophy for any situation, and our outcomes proved it time and time again.

This article originally appeared on The Daily American: Nick Jacobs column about kindness in healthcare