Afaal’s Column

Everyday people queue up to take a token in the morning, at noon and in the afternoon. Almost five queues are formed everyday at different times. The number of people in the queue depends very much on the doctor on duty and the times when the doctor starts appointments. Tokens for a particular doctor’s duty get released an hour before the consultation time. In order to get a token people start to queue up as early as two or even three hours before the token release time. And the worst part is that tokens for a doctor may run out without everyone in the queue getting one. It is a hassle and it is annoying!

It is also difficult administratively. A staff member has to monitor the queue every time and also have to hand over an additional identification token to each person in the queue for each doctor separately. This way the people waiting would know that that they would not get a token on that day. Anyway, as I said before it is an annoying situation.

So what can we do to stop this form happening? Well we have already done some work on this. For example for the gynecology department, after the first contact, appointments are set for the rest of the nine months. Some other departments are also practicing this system now. This is a relief for these patients and also well appreciated when customer relations call to remind them the appointment. This is why for some doctors the number of tokens release for queue on a particular day varies. The doctor still consults the average standard of 35 or more patients a day.

We are contemplating to totally abolish the queue. How? By introducing phone and email appointments. But we will have to be well prepared and the mechanism needs to be tested before full implementation. We are also trying to work on a more interactive token machine.

Some people suggest starting to release the tokens in the morning for the doctors who will be on duty that day. My view on this is it will not solve the problem since then there will be a long long long long queue in the morning.

Irony is, even if we have a queue or appointments, we will not be able to give a token to each and every one on the same day they require it. The solutions to this would perhaps be increasing the number of doctors and consultation rooms. There is a difficulty with this also at the moment since there is no space and the scarcity of doctors applying for even available vacancies.

I feel that there should many ways by which a patient can get a doctor’s appointment. Walk-in, phone, email and by website too. I am very determined to get these conveniences to the care seekers and hope to make amends to make it easier for you to get an appointment. I feel for you all waiting in the queue.

All bright ideas are welcome and we will try to learn from shared experiences.

Many people still ask me about the change in the Hospital logo. It’s been over an year since the logo has been changed through a process of corporate rebranding that all the companies in the ADK Group went through. This article was previously published in my old blog and now I republish it for those who keep asking the question.

“Rebranding is the process by which a product or service developed with one brand, company or product line affiliation is marketed or distributed with a different identity. This may involve radical changes to the brand’s logo, brand name, image, marketing strategy, and advertising themes. These changes are typically aimed at the repositioning of the brand/company, usually in an attempt to distance itself from certain negative connotations of the previous branding, or to move the brand upmarket.” (Wikipedia the free Encyclopedia)

Today many corporates are rebranding themselves for many reasons. Some companies rebrand themselves to renew its publicity and acceptability to the public. Others do it to establish themselves in the market with business growth and some others do it to get a new vibe to the business.

Many people ask me about the change of ADK hospital logo. One of the first tasks that I took up when I joined the hospital was to rebrand it. But then this came as a combined effort from all other ADK businesses with an internal reform process of the ADK structure. The prominent ADK letters in a triangle is a simple and nice logo, but it did not seem appealing that all ADK companies use the same logo since it kind or devalues it. The younger companies of the ADK umbrella, namely ADK Travels and ADK Trade and Shipping both came up with new logos. Hospital and ADK Company as well as the parent company ADK Enterprises were using the triangular logo. Thus, to give the prominence to the original ADK logo, the restructuring process made this the identity for the parent company, i.e. ADK Enterprises Pvt. Ltd. Hospital and Company went for rebranding.

The things we looked for when getting a new logo was for it to be modern, soft and acceptable and catchy to the general public. Also we looked at the meaning of the logo, what the logo depicts.

Designers came up with over twenty possible logos for the hospital. A panel of judges selected the top five among those. The staff of ADK Hospital decided the final logo. Once we got the top five, we conducted a poll among all the staff of the hospital. This was very exciting for them since this was the first time that they got to participate in such a decision. The reason I did it was to get staff motivated by indicating to them that they have a say in things we do. Also it gave ownership of the new brand to the staff. Some 42% of the staff voted to adapt the current logo.

Finally coming to the logo, the logo depicts the following meaning.

The snake wrapped around the wand represents the rod of Asclepius used as the international medical symbol, depicting healing through medicine. The apple denotes health and well being as well as prevention. This is used in modern subtle way to reflect the artistic features that we looked for.