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The World’s third largest employer after the Chinese Army and the
Indian Railways—the UK’s National Health Service is to introduce
a system by which patients will rate the quality of their medical
care by the system and subsequent funding (by Government) will be
given relative to the level of quality achieved. Isn’t this a good
idea—the people whose welfare and health is being paid for by
government (whose money comes from the people) can actually assess
how they are dealt with, and this assessment will mean that poor
quality hospitals or doctors will have greater difficulty obtaining
their future budgets. “A government service with private sector
characteristics,” as Deng Xiao Ping may have said.
Extend this idea to the Philippines, imagine, if
it were honestly administered what would be the effect on certain of
the government’s services (the postal service for example).
Incentivising government services is a good idea in general I think,
but it must be done in an intelligent and effective way—to pay
incentives to companies that remove illegally parked vehicles, by
the number of vehicles they take to the pound within a given length
of time, is to potentially encourage abuse. To pay bonuses to the
police for the number of tickets they issue for driving offences is
similarly open to abuse, as is the payment of incentives to tax
collectors linked to the amount of taxes that they collect in any
given time. Quality rating of medical services by patients is less
open to abuse, conclusions will only be drawn after evaluation of
large numbers of assessments and I would hope that the
questionnaires that the patients complete pose the right objective
questions.
Government to business or individual, culture in
the Philippines seems rather less open. There would be little chance
of an individual challenging the level of service provided by a
government department here—I wonder are there any effective
channels for complaints? Several times I have tried to call the
number painted on the back of trucks, buses and taxis which is a
Land Transportation Office complaints line, never once has there
been any answer. I once heard the Secretary of Trade and Industry
ask anybody who had a complaint about red tape matters to get in
touch with him—if it were possible to get directly in touch with
Mr. Favilla then I’m sure that action would have been taken and
the complaint addressed—however, how to get in touch with the
Secretary? The best that would be on offer would be to make contact
with a lower level person whose job would be to deal with complaints
but who would most likely be quite un-empowered to do anything about
them—how then is anything to change? In my dealings over
complaints, and I certainly can complain! I generally meet with
defensiveness, people telling me that it is in fact me that is wrong
rather than the incident about which I am complaining—the best I
get is a “deaf ear.”
Very few services by government or for that
matter the private sector are flawless, but rather than pretend that
they are by the cunning stratagem of having un-empowered people
dealing with the customers, wouldn’t it be better and lead to
improvement if complaints were really listened to, analyzed, and
deficiencies corrected. We all know it is not a perfect world,
don’t we?
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Mike can be contacted at mawootton@gmail.com
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