What, you may be asking, does urgent care have to do with chocolate?
One thing we all know, whether you are running an association or unlocking your urgent care center doors every morning, is that as each day dawns (in the wise words of Forrest Gump), you never know what you are going to get.
Will this be a record-setting patient visit day or an inexplicable lull? Will a couple hundred people show up for the 2007 Fall Conference or was 2006 just a fluke? (They did show up—over 200 of them!) Is the urgent care industry going to continue its upward climb for many more years or are the retail clinics going to be the end of us all?
So, what do we do?
We get the best information we can find.
If you’ve been involved in urgent care for any length of time, you know that definitive, national data on our industry are pretty scarce. Therefore, if our National Benchmarking Survey arrives on your desk in January, please take the time to complete it and return it. It is critical to the industry—and the success of us all—that you do so.
We network.
Many times, success really does turn out to be related to who you know. So, make the effort to get to know some people! Come to the 2008 Urgent Care Convention, get out on the Forums on www.ucaoa.org, or just pick up the phone and call us and we’ll connect you to other members.
We try to do the right thing.
No one will ever have enough information or enough contacts to guarantee success. This is where success gets connected to who you are and why you are here; are you in your business truly for the patient/customer/association member, or merely to serve your own purposes?
I will tell you why UCA is here: we are here for you. And if we are to live up to our founding purposes, we need to do an even better job connecting with our members.
So, if you are a UCA member, soon we will be e-mailing you our own survey—not about the industry (the Benchmarking Survey has that covered), but about what you want from UCA. Think of it as our own little box of chocolates, from us to you. And even though we don’t know what we’re going to get back, we can’t wait to find out.
Hope all of you have a few special surprises as well this holiday season, and we’ll look forward to seeing you in 2008.