Strengthening services delivery during drought.

How will your organisation cope with strengthening services?

Goals must include delivering interventions to reduce the impact of drought on people’s health and well-being. A good place to start is managing your team’s stress levels.

Strengthening services provision or delivery is an immediate output of the inputs into the community system, such as the health workforce, procurement and supplies, and financing. Increased inputs should lead to improved service delivery and enhanced access to services. Ensuring the availability of services to meet a minimum quality standard and securing access to them are critical functions of a system.

To monitor progress in strengthening service delivery, it is necessary to determine the dimensions along which progress would be measured. Therefore, building evidence for enhancing health and other service delivery must proceed alongside efforts to restructure service delivery to meet the increased demand.

Community leaders and policymakers assessing their systems should participate in the process to deliberate on ways to evaluate the key outcomes required by their community.

Customer service is an attitude, not a department or a job.

Broad, open-ended questions are great for discovering what is happening in the community. They help you connect with people personally, understand what is important to them, and create better health outcomes.

It may be a long time since you heard a decent idea to improve something. You can get sick of the same tired old ideas, and nothing changes. Occasionally, some revolutions generate many exciting things and then come to nothing.

A new idea can be tedious and dumb. Similarly, a new twist or properly implementing an old method can be exciting. So, having a bunch of new ideas is not necessarily critical.

So many organisations make these mistakes.

Decisions are easy; choices are hard. A good decision is your best analysis of the facts, options and risks. If it’s too close to call, flip a coin and get on with it. On the other hand, a choice involves understanding our priorities, evaluating our preference for risk and sometimes, changing our minds. None of these is easy.

If you face a difficult choice, it’s helpful to stop thinking about it as a decision. It’s a choice. Decisions are strategic; choices are personal. It’s about positioning your offer as the only logical solution for your ideal customers. So, open a new notebook with blank pages, waiting for new stories, objectives, and lessons about overcoming adversity.

Quotable quotes.

“If a new service or a process does not turn you on, it’s not the one for you. You have a choice, do something about it or step aside and do something else, don’t keep acting like it’s doing what you expect”. Peter Sergeant

“Employees with insight don’t just deliver the value of your services; they become the value”. Peter Sergeant