Our 12 Months to Christmas

This holiday season, we have been looking back at how the years’ events have shaped Energesse and how we help our clients. There’s gratitude in everything we do, and we would like to recap our 12 months to Christmas!

January: We presented our inaugural Energesse Patient Experience (PX) Awards to two well-deserving clients – Western Sydney LHD (WSLHD) in Australia and Bagan Specialist Centre in Malaysia. They achieved significant wins in progressing their organisation’s measurement and improvement capabilities, see here.

February: We helped deploy the MES real-time patient feedback and survey platform at South Western Sydney LHD (SWSLHD) who gained strong traction across their hospitals including Liverpool, Bankstown Lidcombe, Bowral & District, Camden, Campbelltown, and the Oral Health Clinic. Find out more about their story here.

March: We celebrated when the Energesse-WSLHD partnership was as a Finalist for the Best Digital Transformation Project Award at the 2018 Australian Healthcare Week Excellence Awards! We continue to work with WSLHD in their patient experience efforts. We also helped Eastern Melbourne PHN (EMPHN), via their CEO Robin Whyte, her Board and executive with the further development of their Strategy and Performance framework. Our process to do this has now gained interest from other PHNs. 

April: I was honoured to be invited to be the Keynote Speaker at the Australian Telehealth Conference organised by the Health Informatics Society of Australia (HISA) – the recording of the keynote can be viewed here. I also delivered a patient experience workshop at the PXSymposia organised by NSW Health.

May: I had the opportunity to speak about how the research sector could improve Consumer Engagement at the Research Australia Speaker Series. It was great to be part of the panel with Jean-Frederic Levesque from the Agency of Clinical Innovation. Attendees came from across the Australian research landscape and were supported by the Garvan Institute and Vodafone Foundation. Great job to CEO Nadia Levin and her team for organising it.  Click here for more info.

June: I had the pleasure of interviewing Martin Bowles, CEO of Calvary Health as part of the Certified Public Accountant (CPA) Health Leaders Roundtable podcast. A few weeks later I was invited to deliver the education keynote on Strategy and Performance Optimisation to health financial leaders i.e. CFO’s and financial managers, to help them play a bigger role in strategic decisions.

We also completed the process of becoming a member of the Apple Consultant Network (ACN). We are looking forward to evolving the relationship with Apple Health and helping use Apple products to improve experiences in hospitals and other healthcare organisations in 2019.

July: We held our inaugural Patient Experience Roundtable in partnership with The Beryl Institute and WSLHD. The Roundtable helped leaders and patient experience champions understand how to make a greater impact in the patient experience movement, share learnings and network. It was great to have the President of the Beryl Institute, Jason Wolf as speaker – this was the first PX Roundtable outside of Australia! CEO of WSLHD, Danny O’Connor also delivered the opening speech on how to engage leaders in patient-centered care. Find out more here. 

We love teaching and education, so July marked the start of our hugely popular free online Energesse Master class series. We covered a range of topics on patient-centered care to help managers and clinicians on patient experience improvement and culture change and increase skills and capability.

August: We were very excited to share our Energesse Patient Experience Maturity Model – a solution aimed at identifying the patient experience maturity level of a healthcare organisation. The solution conducts a gap analysis and capability assessment on person-centered care and identifies ‘what-to-do’ to improve patient experience and progress on the maturity spectrum. It also has matrices for ‘how to do it’ i.e. actions, solutions to improve PX-centered capabilities. We are thrilled about our first use-case to a major hospital in Victoria. If you feel the PX Mate might speak directly to your pain points, just call or email us to find out more.

September: I was grateful for the opportunity to help patients with hearing difficulties as we ran an online training event on ‘Client-Centered Care’ with Australian Hearing. It was a great opportunity to share our learnings with a new segment of health professionals, clinicians and managers. 

October: We continued to expand our presence in championing patient experience movement through partnerships in IHF Brisbane and the IHI-BMJ Conference in Melbourne. We are proud to continue supporting these leading events.

November: We were at the Healthshare Expo. We also collaborated with Avent Edge for the PX Summit in Melbourne. It was also the month we delivered patient experience training to some of the top cardiologists in Malaysia, at the National Heart Institute (IJN) in Malaysia. IJN is the hospital that saved my father’s life when he went through a quadruple bypass and I count this opportunity as one of my top 5 career highlights of all time, as the cardiologist that treated my dad was actually in the training session I delivered there!

December: We were very thankful to have Nick Ryan, CEO of the Australian Aged Care Quality Agency work with us, to share learnings with the aged care sector, as we have been asked to support consumer engagement and experience improvement for aged care organisations in 2019.

Against the backdrop of these highlights, we welcomed more partridges in our pear tree! Two new employees joined us with great impact, Sharon Dayus (former ICU Nurse and eMR implementation analyst from Cambridge Hospitals Trust UK) as our Patient Experience Specialist and Charles Janoras, (Data Science from Phillipines) in our Operations team.

Energesse has had an amazing year -and it is mostly thanks to you, who are out there putting in the hard work to improve the health and wellbeing of peoples’ lives. My team and I are very grateful for your continued effort and support, and we hope for an even greater 2019, making more waves in evolving the patient experience movement!

How to Strengthen your Relationships

As I was coaching a few clients last week, I came across an acronym that I thought would be useful to share with some of you particularly with some of you developing professional or personal relationships with people. One of the good ways to structure how you build a relationship as you move towards progress in your life, or in your business, is to think about the acronym FORD.

It stands for Family, Occupation, Recreation and Dreams. 

Here’s a short video where I discuss FORD for Developing Relationships.

Can you be spiritual and still go to the pub?

I recently began to explore a question that many people my age and in my social circles have frequently thought about but very rarely discussed explicitly. These are the kinds of people who have gained a reasonable level of personal maturity and success, but also into having a good time and letting your hair down whenever the opportunity presents itself.

They are generally confident in their outlook, with a broad understanding of health consciousness and some of whom are in varying stages of exploring their spirituality.

In our younger days, and some even now, are hard party goers. Many frequent pubs and bars, perhaps less so than five to ten years ago. I myself have been very much into having a few wines or beers particularly in my twenties, studying medicine in England and fraternising with the ‘work hard/play hard’ mentality of the medical fraternity.

In fact some cultures would regard such consumption of pints of alcohol and frequently dance venues even ‘hedonistic’. Naturally, in some cultures such as in Muslim countries, consuming alcohol even goes against religion.

Spirituality on the other hand conveys a sense of pureness, of religion, temples, mosques and churches and people dressed in robes. Aren’t those the first things that come to our mind when you think about spirituality?

What I am finding, is that spirituality seems be redefining itself in current society, but also in our own internal journey and self-discovery. Society now wants to hear from spiritualists who not just talk the talk in contemporary, modern terms but can also walk the talk in a balanced way.

What I am finding, in my own personal journey of conscious growth and particularly with the journeys of many others around me, is that while we enjoy exploring our own inner self or ‘spirituality’ even deeper, we are still attached to some our usual ways of letting our hair down.

Of course, we may still be engrossed in sports, outdoor recreational activities, the movies or artistic festivals and concerts. These are all fun but these are not the activities that occasionally seem to bring about a sense of internal conflict and personal emotional imbalance.

What I mean is spending time in pubs, bars or nightclubs, having a few drinks, getting drunk, smoking cigarettes or even taking recreational drugs (yes, some people do this!)or even other activities that border on the illegal. And yet, they are still exploring their spirituality.

Now, I am in no way encouraging or condoning any illegal activity or much less anything that is unethical or morally offensive. Yes I do realise that most people are on a journey, a transition from one way of doings things and routine behaviours, to another way of doing things, and thinking about them more consciously.

And this journey takes time. It can take months, years or even decades. And in the mean time, we are on a ‘middle ground’, on a path with a million crossroads, some leading us to explore our more ‘sinful’ side and some leading us to explore our more spiritual side.

Our humanity, our human-ness is therefore a duality. It is a duality of right and wrong, of light and dark, of external instant gratification of pleasures versus a more internal obtainment of inner peace. And that appears to be normal.

From what I’ve observed and what I know, there never seems to be a clear boundary within ourselves between the two forces. On a short term daily basis, people are constantly swinging from one side to another in their daily behaviours. Some swing more in one way than another.

However, in the longer term I also observe people evolve over time and gain a sense of enlightenment where they become more at peace with themselves. But these people, also first loved both sides of themselves.

They did not feel guilt, shame or pain as motivators for becoming better people. Instead they started with accepting themselves for who they are, for their own duality. And this acceptance occurred at a very deep level.

Instead they were motivated by happiness, and by this I mean true inner happiness. I saw these people to have a desire to serve others and have the ability to detach from mundane daily stresses and look at life and the world from a whole bigger picture.

And yes, some of them even continue to enjoy a drink every now and again, as they were treading along this path of inner growth and higher purpose.

So the question I ask you then is….. can you explore your spirituality while still going to the pub?

Community relationships are vital to wellbeing – 6 Secrets for life-long connections

I recently attended a conference in the Dominican Republic called Awesomeness Fest. Frankly, I did not know what to expect other than that there were world class speakers in the online marketing, personal development and health and wellbeing space.

This suited my needs just fine as I needed the latest knowledge in all three areas to help spread our mission at Energesse.

However, what I experienced just blew me away. I found people connected extremely easily, smiles and hugs abound. I found people who were immensely talented and high achievers, yet like minded souls who wanted to change the world for the better.

I found new friendships that blossomed as if we had known each other for several lifetimes. It was uncanny how this happened. 

wellness wheel-03-03

Connection with a social community you love is critical to your wellbeing. I certainly have this in Sydney, yet I still felt there was a gap. This gap was filled at Awesomeness fest, where I found a community that I loved.

This community was also ready to intellectually and motivationally inspire me to climb to the next level of my personal evolution.

It’s hard sometimes to find that community, but trust me they are out there. My ‘Social & Relationships’ score on my Wellness Wheel jumped from an 7 to a 10 at Awesomeness Fest, and I now feel connected with this amazing community via our Facebook group.

I am sure you may already have communities that we are connected with – they might special interest meet ups, religious groups, educational or extracurricular activities or even groups of special friends.

However, I find some people attend such gatherings, but don’t really make the most of the opportunity in being a part of them. As such, I want to provide you with 6 tips to make stronger connections in ANY social or community group you are interested in or actually currently belong to.

1.                  Find communities you love

If you feel you are not already in a community that you can really resonate with, then it’s time to consider looking for a new one.

My advice is to find a community that you absolutely love being a part of, not just one that seems cool or that you have a special interest in. It’s always good to explore, try out a few sessions in one of these communities before you commit to them long term.

For example, you could try a cooking class, or sit in on a meditation session or even join a bird-watching group for a day. Ultimately, it’s not just the activity but the people in the group that will help you decide if it aligns with your innermost heartfelt needs and a cause that you believe in

2.                  Connections are about quality not quantity

There are some people that attend community gatherings and potter from one person to the next, have superficial conversations and exchange business cards in the speed of an ATM withdrawal.

It may give the impression of popularity when someone knows everyone’s name in the room however the reality is that for true wellbeing, we need to have deep and meaningful connections.

We do not have to have many connections, but just a few that help us evolve ourselves to happier, healthier and successful human beings. The quality of our relationships with a select few individuals within a community is enough to keep us engaged and wanting more.

3.                  The power of online is offline

These days there are many communities that are online such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Meetup. These are wonderful ways to connect with others, find special interest groups and connect with like-minded individuals.

However, some studies have shown some people feel more depressed after spending time on Facebook, rather than happier. Also, internet marketing experts will tell you that the power of these online relationships increases significantly when you engage with your online contacts offline.

Again, this is not about numbers, rather it is about meaningful relationships to you. Rather than searching for new communities to be a part of, try to engage your online contacts by meeting them in person. You may find that you have more fun and build deeper trust that way.

4.                  Be authentic

The whole “just be yourself” quote is so often used, yet so rarely followed. People crave authenticity. Deep inside, we all want to expose our inner self without judgement, yet we often hold back because we fear what other may think of us if we really did so.

Nonetheless, all the evidence shows that when we really expose our truths and vulnerabilities, we gain so much more in friendships, love and lasting relationships.

So don’t be afraid to show off your true self. Whatever trauma, defect or disability you think you may have, the next person has just as much and will probably be very relieved to know your honesty.

Be the first to have the courage to expose your truths and your community will love you for it, if they are genuinely the right community for it.

5.                  Don’t be selfish, share your connections

Sometimes we find gems of human beings in our community and we just want to hold on to them. We want all their time, we want to hang with them as much as possible and are afraid to introduce or share them with others.

The fear is that if they are introduced to other friends who find them more interesting, then your new connection will leave you. Perhaps this has happened in the past.

Do recognise that if this happens, then this is more about you not loving and valuing yourself, rather than not being valued by others. Its paramount that you recognise your own beauty, talent and strengths and appreciate them. Others will follow.

When you are generous in sharing your connections openly with others, you will receive the same in return and meet more amazing people.

6.                  The best relationships are long term, so be patient

The best relationships take time, and the communities that we enjoy the most are often ones that we have a long history with.

Even if we don’t attend all their events and miss a few over long periods, the ones that we commit to in spirit can be the ones that rewards us the most.

If you have found a community with the right cause and interest, invest the time in getting to know the people in it. As it the line from the movie ‘Shrek’, people are like onions, we have layers.

The more time you spend in uncovering your layers and theirs, the greater the bonds that form. This will help greatly in sustaining your happiness and wellbeing, particularly in challenging times.

I hope these tips help you improve your social & relationship score in all your communities, so you may better enhance your total wellbeing.

Do you other tips that you use to improve your connections with your community?

 

How your life experiences can heal you

Occasionally I experiment with my blogs and write about topics close to my heart, rather than the purely factual content. From my experience, I feel that us humans can heal in many ways, sometimes through medical science, surgery and medications, and other times through connection, music and even poetry.

In our ultimately finite lives, I believe we are here to make a difference in the lives of others, but also to make a difference with our own lives.

I believe we should grow and evolve as individuals, whilst living a life that is rich with joy and amazing experiences to suit our own fulfilment.

One such experience was the extravagant ‘Awesomeness Fest’ which I recently attended which hosted some of the best speakers, connections, parties and learning that I have ever gained in a period of a week.

It also helped that this was held in a 5 star resort in the Dominican Republic.

Needless to say, I found it challenging to describe my experience to my friends and family upon my return and so choose to express it in poetry. I hope you find this somehow entertains your day and heals your thoughts, if even for a minute….

I once visited the Land of Awesomeness
Where a million stories were told
Where ideas of hacking humanity were bought
And yet not one person sold

New words like ‘paradisical’ were born
Yet needed no immediate translation
A 40 hour journey from the Land of Oz
Was merely a shortcut to mental emancipation

A costly adventure and more for some
Tested if one’s courage would hold
Yet every peso spent on this lifetime memory
Was well worth its weight in gold

As I embraced the nature of Latin timing
‘Action-o’clock’ had to wait a while
But as gratitude engulfed my peace in greenery
It just allowed me more time to smile

Warm conversations greeted breakfast mornings
While the chorizo and eggs were getting cold
Meditation awakened the spirit of the early bird
While malt spirits guided the night owls home

The Caribbean sun held no one back
From breathwork yoga on the beach
Where two hours sleep after dawn would crack
Never stopped Afesters learn or preach

We knew the likes of Vishen the sage
Would weave his saintly magic
Yet every brilliant speaker’s depart from stage
Also felt just as tragic

Online marketers matched global healers
Who taught us to live in virtual flow
While random punters chanting “I love myself”
Showed a big heart arises from no ego

Extended hugs matched business nous
Revealed the tribe’s energy and intention
Once love fills an entrepreneur’s house
Success thrives beyond imagination

Parties in castles, pools, sand and sea
Rivalled even Rio’s proud Carnevale
When heartbeats pressed against you and me,
Wished secret postponement of the grand finale

The illusion was that we could only connect,
In this wondrous tropical serenity,
Yet the truth be known it was always possible,
When we live in pure authenticity

So let’s take this moment to never forget
What you wish to always remember,
That true greatness comes from the love in your soul,
It’s time, let’s change the world together!