Indian Institute of Job Training (IIJT) a wholly owned subsidiary of TeamLease has now teamed up with cancer care major HealthCare Global Enterprises (HCG) to train its 1300 employees on the emotional aspects of patient management. The training would begin from its Bangalore centre followed by its hospitals at Hubli, Ranchi, Cuttack, Delhi and Vijayawada.

“Hospitals in India are plagued by quality and service standards meted out to customers and the idea is to keep the patient calm till he/she meets the doctor  or surgeon. With healthcare providers across India not adhering to stringent hiring process, soft skills training is proving to be indispensable. Globally hospitals are systematic and trainings are organized as part of a developmental initiative,” said  Shajan Samuel, Divisional Head (South), IIJT.

All the employees at HCG Hospitals would go through a pre conceived Domain Assessment Test based on the required skill sets and after training there would be a Post Training Domain Assessment Test to gauge the efficacy of the training. This training would be highly interactive and would include scenario based role plays. The programme will cover training for soft skills like communication, stress management, personality development, anger management, empathy, leadership and conflict management to enable participants to pro-actively be sensitive to inmates’ emotions.

The soft skill training focuses on communication, hygiene ,interpersonal skills ,team work ,customer orientation. It is for the first time that HCG is looking for a structured training program , earlier to this they have conducted adhoc  training for their employees . The duration is for 15 days per batch of 20 candidates for 2 hours each at the Hospital premises. The work place was chosen to handle actual situations emerging out of the hospital which employees needed to handle.

The Institute is looking at covering over 95 per cent of employees comprising   ground staff, including front office, customer care, nurses, who have a direct interface with the patient and the remaining 5 per cent would be consist of the core team for conduct leadership training.

In its foray into the healthcare space, IIJT has created a broad structured soft skills training programme for any speciality hospital. For the patient, it is important to signal that the hospital has a reliable system in place where care is monitored with precision.

Hospitals need to transform customer experience at all levels. Customer empathy focus to control apprehensions and tensions are been now looked into. A major challenge for trainers is to motivate the employees to participate and apply the theory in real life scenarios. There is a lot of improvisation required at the point of interception between a patient and a employee where the latter need to act fast. Therefore the merit of the training  and the changes it brings would come in over a period of time, said the IIJT head.