During the Patient and Employee Experience Program at Saudi German Hospital Ajman, the lobby coffee shop became my working base. It is where you see most of the hospital dynamics: patient arrivals, staff on breaks, the pharmacy queue building across the corridor, a family member pacing while waiting for news. If you want to understand how a hospital feels from the inside, the lobby cafe is one of the most honest places to sit.
This time, a patient came in one morning, not well, moving carefully in the way people do when something hurts and they would rather not show it. He found his way past reception and stopped at the coffee shop. The barista greeted him by name. He had seen him before. He asked how he was feeling and already started making his coffee the way he had ordered it last time. He said something warm and brief. The patient smiled with a genuineness that had not been there since he walked through the door.
His appointment had not yet begun and nothing clinical had happened, yet something in his experience of that hospital had already shifted. He was slightly more at ease, more trusting, more open to whatever came next. The barista had done something no clinical protocol had asked of him and no patient experience training had ever covered. He had made a human being feel seen.
“Patient experience does not begin at the nurse’s station. It begins the moment someone decides to come.” - Raluca Berchiu, Founder & CEO, CXM
Some of the employees shaping your patient experience have never attended a patient experience meeting
Most hospital patient experience programs are built around clinical and frontline teams. Doctors, nurses, receptionists, call center staff. This makes obvious sense but it misses something important.
The experience a patient has is not produced by these teams alone. It is produced by every person that patient encounters from the moment they arrive to the moment they leave: the valet who greets them at the entrance, the concierge who notices they look uncertain and walks them to where they need to go rather than pointing, the cleaner working quietly in the corridor who makes eye contact and nods, the security staff member at the door who holds it open and says good morning, the barista who remembers a name and smiles. For a patient arriving frightened or in pain, these interactions often determine whether the hospital feels like a place that sees them. Before a single clinical word has been spoken.
What happens is that most of these people are outsourced, employed by third-party contractors, managed by different supervisors, paid under different terms. They are rarely if ever included in any conversation about patient experience, because they are considered peripheral to the clinical mission. The patient, however, has no awareness of these organizational boundaries. They do not know who is employed directly and who is contracted. They experience every person they encounter as a representative of the hospital. Every interaction carries the hospital’s name whether the hospital intends it to or not.
At Saudi German Hospital Ajman, one of the most consequential things the Patient and Employee Experience Program surfaced was exactly this. When every member of the hospital workforce, including the teams that most organizations would never include in a patient experience conversation, was brought into a shared process of understanding what patient experience means at this institution, what emerged was richer and more accurate than anything the clinical data alone had shown. The people closest to patients at their most unguarded moments knew things about the patient experience that the formal reporting had never captured and that no satisfaction survey had thought to ask.
What patients feel before a single clinical word has been spoken
Think about what a patient is feeling when they walk through the hospital entrance. In most cases, they are frightened. They are in an unfamiliar environment, often in pain or worried about someone they love.
Now, imagine what a small act of genuine human warmth can do in these circumstances. It won’t cure the illness or change the clinical picture, but it reduces the cortisol load that anxiety produces, makes the person more present and more communicative and more willing to trust the care they are about to receive. A patient who arrives at the consultation feeling that the hospital has already noticed them, already cared about them in the small ways that cost nothing, is a different patient from the one who has navigated thirty minutes of indifference before the appointment begins. They ask better questions. They share more relevant information. They follow through on what they are told. The quality of the clinical outcome is not independent of the quality of what came before it.
Hospitality has understood this for a long time. A world-class hotel does not begin the guest experience at check-in. It begins in the driveway, in the twenty seconds between the car door opening and the lobby entrance, in the tone of the first greeting. Every moment before the clinical interaction begins is an opportunity to establish trust. Healthcare has been slower to absorb this than it should have been, but the hospitals genuinely building patient experience cultures are the ones applying it now.
“The best ideas for healthcare rarely come from healthcare. They come from the industries that have been designing exceptional human experiences for decades. Our job is to translate them.” - Raluca Berchiu, Founder & CEO, CXM
Outsourced team means a different contract. It does not mean a different Patient Experience.
There is a structural problem that sits underneath all of this. When a hospital outsources its parking, its catering, its cleaning or its security, it transfers the employment relationship but it cannot transfer the patient’s experience of those services. The patient does not experience the parking as a contracted service. They experience it as the hospital’s welcome. The cleaner is not a third-party employee to them. He is the person who either acknowledged them in the corridor or walked past them as though they were not there. Both of those interactions happen under the hospital’s name regardless of whose payroll processes them.
This is something most hospital leadership teams have not fully worked through. The standard of care and warmth your hospital wants to be known for cannot stop at the boundary of direct employment. It has to extend to everyone whose interaction with a patient happens under your roof. A patient experience standard that applies to clinical staff but not to the person greeting patients at the entrance is not really a standard. Patients feel the inconsistency long before they can put words to it.
When that practice is recognized, named and shared across the organization, it becomes a standard the whole hospital can build from rather than an individual behavior that existed by accident and could disappear the day that person changed jobs.
Every hospital has someone like “the barista”. In most hospitals, that person has never once been told that what they are doing has a name, that it matters beyond the warmth of the individual moment, or that the organization would like everyone to do it. CXM’s program is designed to find those people, surface what they have built through instinct and turn it into something the whole organization can learn from and hold.
The appointment is thirty minutes. The patient’s experience started when they left home.
Patient experience is not a department or a NPS score. Patient experience is the sum of everything a person feels, perceives and carries away from their entire encounter with a hospital, from the moment they turn into the car park to the moment they leave the building. That sum is produced by every person, every space and every moment of attention or inattention, from the moment they arrive to the moment they leave. The clinical consultation is one part of that sum, a smaller part than most hospital programs are built to address, because the conditions in which a patient receives clinical care determine how much of that care they can actually absorb.
The hospitals leading on patient experience in the UAE and globally are not the ones with the most sophisticated survey systems or the most detailed service protocols. They are the ones that have understood this at an organizational level and built around it: that the valet’s greeting, the barista’s memory, the cleaner’s quiet acknowledgment, the concierge’s willingness to walk rather than point are not decorative additions to the patient experience. They are the patient experience, as much as anything that happens in the consultation room. The organizations that treat them as such are building something that competitors cannot easily replicate because it lives in culture rather than in process.
Building that understanding across an entire hospital workforce, including every outsourced team, every contracted function and every person who will ever interact with a patient under the hospital’s name, is what genuine patient experience transformation requires. It is also, across every hospital network CXM has worked with in the UAE and the wider Gulf region, the work that most patient experience programs have never done. With every category of employee and contractor, until the understanding was shared and the standard was owned by the people responsible for delivering it, rather than being held somewhere above them in a document nobody refers to after the launch event.
“Most hospitals measure experience. The ones pulling ahead are building it.” - Raluca Berchiu, Founder & CEO, CXM
CXM’s Signature Patient and Employee Experience Program brings hospitality-caliber excellence to hospital networks globally, working through execution until the standard lives in daily operations rather than in a document.