Collaboration in Care - the Secret of Patient Satisfaction
Posted on: August 10th, 2009
Collaboration in Care?
If you had to guess which of the following was the greatest impactor of a patient’s perception of care, which would you choose?
- Clinical Outcomes
- Speed and efficiency of care delivery
- Quality of food
- Clear understanding of what is being done to them and why
- The level of “teamwork” exhibited by staff
In truth, the number one impactor of a patients perception of care is the level of “team play” they see in their hour-by-hour struggle to remain positive in what at best can be described as an “uncomfortable” situation!
Healthcare is a strange business. Oddly, patients show up scared yet with very high expectations of their experience. Compared to other industries, healthcare has the highest “floor” for customer satisfaction. Stated clearly, patients already expect great things when they arrive, so we are far more likely to “let them down” than “meet their expectations”!
If you spend any time perusing patient satisfaction reports, you begin to notice a trend: Patients feel most comfortable when the Docs, RN’s, NA’s, techs, flebots, housekeepers, transporters, nutrition services staff and management work together (in front of them) in crafting care plans or delivering services.
And who wouldn’t! Knowing that all those smart people were working on my behalf to make me better and seeing to my comfort would be delightful! I would feel as safe as circumstances allowed.
But let just one nurse complain about an overflowing trashcan rather than just emptying it and the whole experience can be ruined! Make me wait 30 minutes smelling food after a 20 hour NPO when I can see the trays in the hallways and you can be certain that this fat man will be upset!
In recent years, organizations such as Press Ganey (the dominant customer survey provider in healthcare) have gone to great lengths to educate health systems about just such phenomenon. But it isn’t always percolating through to the staff level. When it comes to customer satisfaction, housekeepers and nutrition services workers carry just as much of the burden of providing care as MD’s and nurses! But not in the way people think . . .
Substandard food or full waste receptacles don’t have nearly the impact on patient perceptions that poor behavior about either do. Apologizing FOR each other or worse yet complaining ABOUT each other in front of patients has a much greater effect on their perception of care than the issue itself does! A quiet collaboration with smiles nearly always un-does the damage a service breach creates.
Being a team isn’t about who does what or even when. It has much more to do with the grace with which we chose to react to the inevitable service failures that our busy world creates!
An Experiment to TRY
- For one week, see how many different types of staff you can get together in front of a patient each day
- For one week, ask staff to find opportunities to compliment a co-worker to a patient or in front of one each day
- For one week, have each team member do at least one part of a co-workers job without grumbling or “having a look”
- For one week, have each staff member say “thank you” to a co-worker in front of a patient each day
Let patients “catch you” in random acts of kindness in the workplace! See what happens to your patients perceptions of care!
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