Given this situation, what should have been the best course of action?

debodun

debodun

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Location
way upstate in New York, USA
A college student is working as a part-time receptionist in an outpatient clinic at a small local hospital. It is late Saturday morning and a patient comes in to get blood drawn for analysis for as a pre-op procedure. The receptionist calls the lab on the intercom to let them know a patient is waiting. Twenty minutes pass and no one comes over from the lab to attend to the patient. The patient asks the receptionist to call the lab again, which the receptionist does. Ten minutes later a technician does arrive and the patient is attended to.

Monday morning, the receptionist arrives at work and is informed the head of the laboratory wants to see her ASAP. She is given a severe tongue lashing FOR PAGING THE LAB TWICE and what was interpreted by the lab staff as arrogance on her part in telling them what their jobs are! She is forced to make a public apology to the lab staff that was on duty that Saturday. The receptionist is humiliated and wanted to know what was so terrible about reminding the lab that a patient had been waiting for 20 minutes.

Should she have been given a reprimand and forced to apologize for what she did? Who is most at fault here - the receptionist, the impatient patient, the lab supervisor or the technicians for speaking to the supervisor on the sly instead of talking directly to the receptionist?
 

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An employee with a grievance as to procedure should speak with the supervisor. That is NOT being "on the sly".

The need for this apology was over the top. A simple reminder of procedure if warranted, was all that was needed.

Medical people are often just too full of themselves. This is just too stupid.
 

I agree with CC and RR.

Any organization that deals with the public should have some basic performance standards and procedures for the employees to follow. If this hospital doesn't have a service standard for patients that addresses wait times then this might be a good time to adopt one.
 
I agree also. It also depends on what the rules are for interactions between the receptionist and the lab. If there's a "do not call us twice" rule, then even if it is a stupid rule, the receptionist should have abided by that. But in any event, the requirement for an apology was over the top.

There may be something else at play here, i.e., hard feelings of some kind between receptionist and lab.
 
I worked at a major hospital for six years. The level of egos was astounding; you had to walk on eggs most of the time or someone would get his/her nose out of joint about something. Everyone had their little bailiwick that you didn't dare cross over the boundary into. Unfortunately, my department dealt with every aspect of the hospital so there was no end of opportunities for someone to get their undies in a twist about something.
 
I agree with everyone here, the receptionist was not in the wrong at all, nor was the patient. There are many times when someone is forgotten, and if they don't speak up they'll be sitting there waiting for a loooong time. The public apology was over the top, ridiculous. I haven't been around many medical people to know about their egos, but somehow I wouldn't doubt it's true in many cases.
 

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