Thursday, February 5, 2009

Critique on a reply letter to a complaint email

I am not scanning the letter because the organization wants this to be kept under wraps. As such, I will just manually type out the letter and leave out some confidential details. This entry would be quite long, so bare with me.

"Dear Miss Tan,

I refer to your email dated ___ with regard to the medical management of your maternal grandmother, (Madam G) at ___. I appreciate the opportunity to communicate with you.

We have concluded our investigations and wish to share with you our findings. . . I am concerned to hear about your feedback regarding the quality of nursing care you observed. We have highlighted your observations to the respective ward managers and our Director of Nursing. We will also tighten up the supervision of enrolled nurses at the ward by staff nurses.

With regard to the consent for the blood transfusion, we acknowledge that there was a delay on our part. . . .When a blood transfusion was ordered for on ___ at 1500 hours, (J) was alerted by our staff nurse . . . (J) gave consent for the transfusion and instructed the staff nurse to obtain the patient's signature on the consent form. . . . At 1700 hours, the House Officer together with the staff nurse checked the blood that had arrived in accordance to the hospital's policy. At this time, an explanation was again given to the patient on the need for a blood transfusion. Unfortunately, the consent form was not signed before the transfusion commenced. It was around this time that other relatives arrived and requested for an explanation regarding the blood transfusion. Eventually, the consent form was signed by (S) at 1953 hours.

We sincerely apologise for this oversight. Our Director of Nursing has reinforced to the senior nurses the need for consent prior to the start of blood transfusion. In addition, such consent should be taken from the patient directly unless the patient does not have the mental capacity to give consent. The family member/spokesperson will be kept informed of the clinical progress of the patient. We hope that with these instructions, a similar lapse will not recur.

Once again, we thank you for giving us the opportunity to reply to your concerns and we remain committed to delivering excellent care and service to our patients at ___."

Now I gonna write a short (but I realize it's not that short after all) critique on the above letter according to the 7Cs of writing.

Courtesy -
This letter does enhance the organization's image and improve our relationship. They have very appropriate choice of words and sentence structure, in addition to beautifying the ugly conflict between my cousin and the doctors. If you have noticed, the focus is usually on them or on the issue itself.

Correctness -
This is written in formal English, which is appropriate given that they are representing their organization.

Conciseness -
Personally, this letter is too long for me. Granted that formal language usually uses more words to convey a point and that they want to be as detailed as possible so as to give as clear an explanation as possible, I lost interest in it after a while of reading. This makes me wonder if my entries so far, have been too long that my readers lost interest after a while of reading. Yet, they are forced to finish reading my entries because they are required to post comments!

Clarity -
This letter is very clear. They addressed all my concerns in my email to them (which I suspect is as long as their letter).

Coherence and Cohesion -
This letter runs very smoothly. I like their use of connectors like "In addition", "Eventually", etc.

Concreteness -
They were very specific. The names of people involved and the time at which critical events happened were listed. Maybe this is not seen by you because I omitted these details out due to confidentiality issues.

Completeness -
Very complete. Everything that I need to know, is stated. The events that unfolded were narrated in chronologial order and what went on in the management level were also stated.

Overall, I actually have nothing to pick on in this letter. Does anyone have any recommendations on how this letter can be improved on?

8 comments:

  1. The letter is almost perfect. However, a lot of information that is given should already been known by the complainer and these information could be ommitted to make it more concise.

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  2. Hi Kalene,

    This letter is really well written. Just some slight points that can be improved.

    I do agreed it lacks conciseness,as the letter is too long. Therefore, for people with limited patience, they may not read through the whole letter, and may miss out important points.

    Also, perhaps you can include a "subject heading" at the beginning of the letter, so that readers can have a grasp of the topic?
    (i'm not sure if it was included, but not typed out though =P)

    Cecilia

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  3. Hieyo!

    Bernard - even though I think the letter is a little too long, I think the info given is necessary as they wanna be explicit.

    Cecilia - is "strictly private & confidential" considered a subject heading? LOL!

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  4. Hey Kalene,

    I agree with you that there is really nothing to pick on with this letter. Though is quite long, but i'm sure we all felt the sincerity of the organization in the way they treated your complaint with utmost importance. (Just like when a couple is writing each other love letters! Haha! I managed to keep the trend going, phew!)

    Like what Cecilia said, adding a subject heading would be better. "Strictly private and confidential" would be concise but too generic.

    Cheers!

    The JohNy with "ONE" N

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  5. Kalene,

    I thought this letter was really well written! And there was once when I filed a complaint letter to another hospital (which I shall not name), they didn't even bother replying me.

    Anyway, I think that the letter has fulfilled the 7Cs. And I would be very surprised that they have done some thorough investigation before writing this letter to you.

    Well, I would appreciate organisations to act on the feedback that we have gave them and to improve on their management further. I believed that two way communication is very important! (:

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  6. Hi Kalene,

    Yup, I realize that the focus is on them, the issue and not the person who filed complains. It is good, because this showed that they admit that the fault lies at their side and not further agitating the complainer.

    They had investigated the issue and presented the scenario to you, hence a long letter. I felt that they are being professional and had taken the feedback seriously. If I were the reader, I would be very satisfied. :)

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  7. Yup yup. Like what Yuan said, two-way communication is very important. Besides, organizations can improve if they receive constructive criticisms positively. >_<

    And like what Jane said, I (the reader) was really satisfied. LOL!

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  8. [This is from Feb 16]

    Hi Kalene,



    First of all, excellent choice of letter - an official legal document - wow. Also, your response is very well organized. I even used it for my own post.



    As Bernard said, this email is very well done - professional even. That could also explain the length - liability and responsibility. They have to put everything there and be complete. There is no room for error in terms of completeness in this situation. Although, on the other hand, there are new laws regarding legal wording and new legislation that all such documents must be written in X words or less, or at least be readable by a layman.



    Cheers

    Matt

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