UHS Story

As our group project comes together, I have been having some thoughts about how it might/could look as an end product. On Wednesday, our group spoke with Dr. Robert Ernst, head medical doctor and an internist at UHS, for over an hour, and it would have gone on longer if we didn't have class and meetings to attend. By 'our group spoke', I really mean that Dr. Ernst spoke, and we listened. The interview had two parts, first, we asked him our predetermined questions for roughly 40 minutes and second, he presented a seemingly endless Powerpoint on patient satisfaction. In the interview, it literally seemed like Doc tried saying as many words as he could after each question, continuously going on tangents into left field and repeating himself as many times as he could, slightly changing the version every time but not the message. After the interview, the three of us were all a little lost. "I never zone out," said one of my partners. "But I have no idea what he said." And she was taking notes.

You know the type of office chairs that spin? Well there weren't any fixed-base chairs to seat him in unfortunately, but I could tell he was getting a little uneasy when he would lean back in his chair cross and uncross his legs, and most notably, spin in the chair. I think clips from the video that I recorded will be very telling. Understandably, he seemed much more comfortable when giving his canned Powerpoint which didn't "answer all of our questions" as he claimed it would from the start. Lucky, we insisted on doing the interview part before his presentation or we might not have gotten a word in at all.

Overall, I think we have the type of interview that can frame our story. That is, open as one of the first key sequences and end the entire piece, providing good organization.

Based on our interview with Dr. Ernst and testimonials from students, there is one aspect that needs to be included in our video: the people that have the bad experiences and the complaints to voice, don't. For whatever reason, it seems to me that they are not represented in the statistics that Dr. Ernst cited. In my opinion, and I can relate, I think these people are so upset over their misfortune with UHS that they basically want to be done with it forever. So when it comes time to complain or fill out a survey, there is no way they are going to waste another second on something like UHS that has provided such a terrible experience for them in the past. Regardless of how much their testimonies could help, I think their understandable bitterness toward UHS angers them to the point of not realizing the usefulness of their experience to help not only other students but also UHS. For this reason, one of the most important questions we need to ask every student is, "Did you complain or tell someone at UHS about your bad experience?" I would be shocked if most answers were no; this hopefully can be strung together to form another key sequence for our video.