The Spirit of Seva

On the occasion of the Sevadal Conference held at Prashanthi Nilayam in 1975, in His valedictory discourse, Swami spoke extensively on Seva — why we should do seva, who should do it, how it should be done and which activities can be taken up.

Swami cited the example of Lord Krishna, who despite being all-knowing and all-powerful, was ready to take up any task as Seva. In the Rajasuya Yagna, Krishna, who was capable of doing anything, took up the task of picking up used plantain leaves that were left behind after the guests had partaken their meals in them. There is no such thing as small or mean tasks as far as seva is considered. Service without expectations of results is akin to Yoga that will grant union with God.

It is with this spirit that senior alumni brothers have strived to serve. Post-COVID, due to lockdowns and travel restrictions, weekend seva had ceased. Swami answered their prayers by giving this opportunity to Serve from Home.

Thanks to the improving situation on the ground in regard to the Covid-19 pandemic. The team has been steadily resuming on-site seva engagements at the SSSIHMS-WFD.

Bangalore-based alumni of the Sri Sathya Sai Educational Institutions, have long been associated with the Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Medical Sciences. Prior to COVID, many brothers regularly attended  the Hospital for seva on the weekends. They would transcribe patient interviews, organise files in the medical records department, clean A/C filters, perform other general maintenance tasks, and at times even take up process improvement tasks.

Their goal was just to make themselves available for seva. They wanted to serve in the capacity the Hospital needed them to at that time, without being overly concerned with the specific tasks.

Physical to Virtual Seva – Changing with times

Just as classes began to be held online, people began to work from home, and meetings and events became virtual, so too, the Seva took a new form. After due discussions with the hospital, an area that needed support was identified. Suddenly, the number of patients calling the hospital helpdesk for clarifications, reschedulings etc. had skyrocketed. And this became a virtual seva opportunity for the alumni.

Integrated Patient HelpDesk for SSSIHMS-WFD & SSSIHMS-PSN

A virtual team of alumni and their family members came together, comprising of members from across the country and overseas. They started to manage the Patient Helpdesk for SSSIHMS-WFD. For the initial months, calls were handled by the hospital staff, and from December 2020 onwards, the volunteer team took over.

The Hospital helpline was set up using cloud telephony technology that offered advantages like:

• Unlimited number of concurrent calls, as against only one call at a time, in case of a fixed landline.
• Volunteers needn’t physically sit at the telephone desk at the hospital. They could do this seva from anywhere.

Services Provided

The patient helpdesk team was equipped to handle diverse range of queries including:

• General queries related to availability of department / speciality.
• Process to avail services of the hospital (OPD Protocol)
• Provide status update on prior enquiries registered by the patients on the online patient helpdesk enquiry portal.
• Register and provide an appointment for entry into the Hospital Main Gate

The number of calls handled (incoming and outgoing) during the months January to September 2021 was over 88,000.

Modus Operandi

• Calls are received on the Patient helpdesk from 8 AM to 4 PM.Monday to Saturday. These are calls made by registered patients and others seeking services of the Hospital, from across the country.
• Every call handled is recorded for quality monitoring and is accompanied with brief notes that is captured on Health4all.online
• The day is divided into 4 slots of 2 hours each to facilitate ease of participation in the seva throughout the week. Each slot would need about 10 members with diverse language capabilities to handle the calls.
• All the volunteers who are part of the call flow on a given day are also required to be logged into a zoom meeting session. This enables support team members to quickly resolve any open queries or support with additional information as necessary.
• Virtual Office – On any given day, there are at least 15 breakout rooms on Zoom. Members log into the Zoom Meeting and go over to their respective breakout room as per their area of contribution. It very much operates as a virtual office space. The Zoom Meeting is live every day from morning 7:30 to evening 9 PM. Members sign-in and sign-out as per their schedule of seva.

Enabling Processes and Supporting Teams

Onboarding and Training

• Volunteers interested to participate in this seva are required to register online using the online Google Form
• An hour-long induction session is conducted every Sunday afternoon, during which the context of the seva, details of seva and expectations from the interested volunteers are discussed in detail.
• Each volunteer agrees and signs a Non-Disclosure Agreement that aims to protect the privacy of patient details and their medical records.

Practical & Hands-on Training

• Hands-on practical training is provided to those who have attended the introduction session and are ready to start the seva activity.
• Volunteers are trained in the use of health4all.online application and are educated on the various services provided by SSSIHMS-WFD & SSSIHMS-PSN.
• Guidelines on Call handling etiquettes are covered in detail.
• Mock calls are conducted to assess the readiness of the volunteer before being put on the live call flow.

Quality Monitoring

• This team mostly consists of volunteers from overseas countries.
• Every call handled via the helpline (inbound and outbound calls) are recorded for quality monitoring purposes.
• This team diligently hears each and every recording on a daily basis. Each call is reviewed within 24 hours and necessary feedback is given to the volunteers.
• Considering the average call duration to be around 6 minutes, and about 500 calls per day, the team therefore listens to about 3,000 minutes of call recordings.
• Where necessary call backs are made to the callers to rectify information gaps.
• Observations collated by this team forms part of the re-training sessions and weekly review sessions.

Weekly Catch-up

All the volunteers involved in this seva are expected to attend the weekly Saturday review session from 7-8 PM.

• These sessions begin with a short video on Swami.
• Quality Observations, Seva Statistics of the Week, Reflections from Volunteers, Retraining Modules, Discussion on Health Topics, Feedback and Review with Senior Alumni from the Hospital, Review of Quiz responses, etc., are the various aspects taken up in these weekly review sessions.

Enhancement to health4all.online

Here is where volunteers adept at coding contribute to enhance the system functionalities. Those familiar with MySQL, PHP-CodeIgniter, with JS, jQuery, Ajax and Bootstrap CSS have an opportunity to apply their technical skills towards this seva. Some of the ongoing and proposed enhancements include:

• On-Call synchronous capture of call notes.
• Dynamic and automated identification and routing of calls to volunteers based on telecom circles to match preferred language of conversation between the caller and the volunteer.
• Automatically populate call history to enable the volunteer to take a look at the past conversations with the caller.
• Video calling feature and many other such enabling functionalities.

The professional manner in which the brothers have gone about setting up this helpline, is a testimony of the Sathya Sai Educational system. This is a unique seva wherein students from His education institution are serving ‘Our Hospital’ as Swami would say – leveraging technology to combine process excellence, enthusiasm of volunteers & the Love for Bhagawan that inspires the entire team.

To be part of this unique initiative, alumni may fill up this form.