Lessons from hospital

By Toby Russell

With all the buzz that currently surrounds the sustainable future of businesses and specifically B-Corps, I was given the ‘lucky’ opportunity by my body to visit what, in my opinion, is the original B-Corp, an NHS hospital.

For those of you who haven’t heard of B-Corps, it is a movement that looks to shift the focus of businesses away from being solely focused on profit and more towards achieving the right balance of purpose and profit. B-Corp is a certified status a business is awarded for demonstrating their positive consideration of the impact that their decisions have on their workers, customers, suppliers, community and environment. The aim is to do businesses into a force for good.

My room for the week resplendent with panoramic views of the carpark.

My story begins after some routine dental surgery to remove two wisdom teeth. In the days afterwards, my cheeks and then neck swelled up. I didn’t think too much of it at the time as I had been told to expect some swelling, and pain levels were not too bad. After the weekend, as things hadn’t really improved, I thought, ‘better have them take a look’ and so trotted off to the dentist. This is when things really shifted up a gear.

The dentist took a quick look and said, ‘Straight off to the hospital, go now, we are phoning ahead’. At the hospital, rather than the usual 3-hour wait in A&E (or ER as it is in the US), I was triaged within 5 minutes and was with a doctor within 10 minutes. Within an hour, I was off to the operating theatres.

Three days later, I was awoken to words I will never forget, “Toby, we need to remove the breathing tube from your throat”, and with that, I re-entered the conscious realm. I found myself in a scary new world. I couldn’t move, I wasn’t really aware of who I was, and in those initial moments felt very much alone, and I just kept my eyes tight shut, hoping it would all go away.

But then the wonders of the NHS kicked in. It was such a loving environment of care and understanding. Initially, in ICU, I received one-to-one nursing, helping me come to terms with what had happened. A procession of teams from physios to dietitians, psychologists to doctors would come to visit, each playing their essential part in making me well again. Every decision, every action appeared focused on my repair.

As I gradually recovered my strength. I escaped ICU and returned to a ward where the exemplary care continued. Now able to talk more easily, I found a friendly, united family of staff who didn’t judge and showed enormous understanding. A low point for me was when I first got out of bed and went for a walk, and halfway down a corridor released what amounted to a mid-sized swimming pools worth of wee all over the floor. I was mortified, yet the staff showed no frustration and treated me with respect and kindness, simply helping me back to the room and reassuring me it wasn’t a problem.

After a week, I was able to return home, and whilst it’s not exactly something I’d recommend for life’s bucket list of must-do experiences, what started as a very negative life event was offset by a very positive experience.

So how is this story relevant to Colart and B-corp? Well, first, let’s set the thinking into rather business-like terms. In the above, I take the role of the customer (which in our world relates to consumers and retail customers), my health was the product, the activity that took place to build up my health was the project, and the huge group of individuals are a high performing cross-functional team.

After a week, I rocked that bed hair look

Here is how I think they nailed it:

• They have an environment of total care, support and love and always had time to listen to you. They clearly identified the customers’ needs (to become well and to feel supported), and all their mission was to deliver to this and create a positive outcome. This is analogous to our customer and consumer care and our need to strive to constantly tune and optimise the experience they receive from our products and our business. Sometimes our customers will make a proverbial small yellow puddle on the floor, and we need to be there to mop it up, help guide them and make their experience of us fantastic.
• Everyone worked as a single cross-functional team working in unison to achieve success. Every role had a clearly defined purpose, and each played its part. It was not about individuals. The doctors had their part, but so did the porters, the cleaners, the nurses, healthcare workers, and many other roles. Each were essential in the delivery of the overall result. This is something I believe strongly is key to our own success. Everything we do involves strong cross-functional working, and the more collaborative we become, the better we will perform.
• They had great internal communication, regularly getting together in huddles to update each other on progress while ensuring they had large blocks of time available to push forward activity. We all work hard at Colart to constantly improve our communications, but we still have a way to go, with many of our lives are still too dominated by meetings. We need to ensure we achieve the right balance putting in place meetings with tight focus and defined outcomes, communicating concisely, clearly and effectively, and always ensuring we have time to ‘do stuff’ built into our regular day.
• They collected lots of data to inform their decisions. This gave them situational awareness on how the customer and product (aka the patient and their health) were performing to make the right decisions. This is a key part of our own strategy. As I’m sure you’ve all seen, we have significantly ramped up our abilities to measure ourselves and our products to provide us with the detail we need to inform our decisions and processes.
• And finally and most importantly, the modus operand of the NHS is to provide benefit rather than purely being driven by the need to make a profit. This doesn’t mean they don’t have the same financial constraints that any business needs to balance the books, but placing benefit first allows them to make decisions that deliver the best outcomes (e.g. people get well). ). This is a seismic change for businesses where traditionally, the focus has been on benefiting the shareholders alone by maximizing their profit.  We are owned by a group with a much broader and longer-term focus, so Colart, as with the rest of the Lindengroup, is starting to take its first tentative steps into this new world that sees us give equal emphasis to people, profit and planet.  This forms an essential part of our future and is critical to the B-corp movement.

Finally, having told my tale, I want to reassure the squeamish amongst us that what happened to me is incredibly rare. Dental infections happen, but mine got nasty without warning or reason. Alas, mother nature can sometimes throw up these wildcards. It hasn’t put me off going to the dentist, and I returned for a check-up a week after leaving the hospital.