120 days in hospital: A grandson’s eye-opening struggle for compassionate care

Behind every leader, innovator or executive are the experiences driving them to create positive change in the world.

Jason S Bradshaw is a world-renowned expert in the customer experience space with the Queensland native leading transformative change for clients such as Optus, Target and Fairfax Media. He’s been featured in Forbes and was named a Top 30 Global Guru in customer experience.

But when you pull back the professional curtains you see someone who just wants the best for their loved ones. 

In June, Jason shared an update on LinkedIn regarding his grandmother who spent over 120 days in hospital after being admitted on December 26, 2023. Jason was by her side for roughly 100 of those days. 

He said despite being in a private hospital with full medical coverage, disagreements between the hospital and his grandmother were common.

“At her request, I stepped in to resolve the situation. I called the posted escalations hotline, which the hospital advertised as the go-to for concerns. After three unanswered calls, I escalated to the nursing unit manager, who appeared to care but quickly forgot,” he shared.

“I then took the matter to the Group CEO and Divisional CEO and contacted the local news network. This approach yielded results, making the apparently impossible, possible.

“During discussions with the executives, they admitted my complaint had alerted them to the broken escalations hotline, which had been out of service for months.

“This experience raises a crucial question: What processes do you have in place to proactively detect system failures or ensure that your systems function as designed?”

Sadly, less than two months after posting on LinkedIn, Jason’s grandmother passed away in her sleep. She had lived a remarkable life, coming just short of her 101st birthday. 

Yet after an arduous experience with the healthcare system, Jason said it highlighted how organisations can portray that their focus is on the patient – or resident – but often it ends up becoming purely task-oriented care.

“With my grandmother, there were a number of instances through her journey that I was less than happy with and she was less than happy about,” he told Hello Leaders.

As mentioned in his LinkedIn post, those instances led to Jason injecting himself into the situation. However, despite the hospital’s best intentions, the escalations process they had established saw each key individual pass the buck until executives – and potentially the media – were involved.

“I had spoken to the nursing unit manager and I was brushed off. I specifically called out the fact that I’d rang the escalation line and not had any replies and I was still brushed off. 

“It wasn’t until I wrote to the CEO and politely suggested that I might also contact the federal minister for healthcare, the local member of parliament, the local TV networks… all of a sudden I had more people than you could imagine ringing me. 

“All of a sudden they wanted to move my grandmother into a different room and what they said was not possible suddenly became possible. It shouldn’t take a customer being empowered enough to write to the CEO to get a resolution to a complaint.”

“Why can it not just be that standard approach to ensure everyone receives the best care?”

This experience puts the spotlight on several issues that can arise within care settings. For example, customers and their advocates should not be forced to contact executives if issues go unresolved. Effective systems need to be implemented. 

And if certain promises are made they must be acted on. Therefore, follow up on the effectiveness of a complaints hotline designed to support patients and their families, as it can clearly hinder or impede their care when it doesn’t work.

Additionally, as Jason queried, do care service providers truly understand who the customer is?

“In the case of my grandmother the customer wasn’t just the person laying in the bed. It was also the person who was there every day for six months. She wouldn’t make a decision without me being in the room so even though I wasn’t the patient I was acutely attached to the outcome,” he explained.

“It’s easy for people in a care setting to forget other people are going to be talking about the experience. My grandmother’s passed on but the experience she had hasn’t died with her. When people ask about the particular hospital we will share the reasons why you should or should not go there. 

“It’s important for leaders to remember that the customer is not just that transactional person that’s in laying in your bed or in your facility”

Jason warned providers not to be blinded by the commercial side to business, imploring them to remember that a patient, aged care resident or home care client, is a person and not a task. 

“My grandmother was discharged from the private hospital on two separate occasions and discharged into community nursing. In both instances, the process was a mystery. We didn’t know what day she would be going home or who the nurse coming to her home would be,” he said.

“Transitioning the patient to that next mode of their recovery is a reflection on how much you care about the patient and the patient experience.”

“As leaders, I would hope that we don’t want a legacy of ‘They did the task well’. Your legacy should be, in my opinion, about making a difference to that customer’s experience because you took an extra step to make it easier.”