A crucial component of a healthcare organization’s overall performance and development is patients’ level of satisfaction with their treatment. The patient experience in an organization, whether an independent hospital or a health system, can significantly influence patient evaluations. Because there are several techniques that a hospital may use to enhance the patient experience, it is critical to start with research and data to identify areas where improvements can be implemented.
Why Is the Patient Experience Important?
When it comes to assessing the quality of healthcare services, a positive patient experience is often the most popular and essential indicator that hospitals use. To conceive of the patient as a customer and the hospital as a company providing the consumer with a service might benefit both parties. When a patient arrives at a facility, each touch point from the front desk to interactions with staff, add up to become the patient experience.
To be successful as a facility, patients need to be satisfied with their experience since this increases the likelihood that they’ll seek care in the future. Fostering patient loyalty through a positive patient experience increases the likelihood of return visits.
In this sense, patient satisfaction has a direct relationship with profit, but it also impacts employee morale and retention. Staff members feel more pleased to work for your institution and are more involved in their jobs when patients are satisfied.
Strategies for Improving Patient Experience
Coordinate Patient Arrivals and Discharges
The initial effect of the pandemic on the healthcare industry was a decrease in the number of elective treatments and care, as well as procedures that were previously deemed non-elective.
With the increase in elective treatments, coordinating the arrival and departure of patients having elective procedures (the time of which is typically within the control of the institution) might be a more effective and long-lasting solution in the short term.
Align Reporting to Maximize Efficiency
Create a uniform reporting structure amongst your department heads so that you may improve the patient flow with the patient’s best interests at the forefront of your mind.
Care is provided from one department to the next, as is common in many healthcare institutions. This might include information from admissions, radiology, surgery, and other departments. When a patient is transferred from one department to another, all actions must perform by each department be recorded.
Clinicians might get dissatisfied when they have little influence over or knowledge of the behaviors outside their departmental boundaries.
Partner with a Healthcare Staffing Agency
The more time a nurse spends with their patients, the higher the patients will rate the quality of treatment and patient satisfaction.
Nurses working in hospitals with high nurse-to-patient ratios often feel overworked, burnt out, and unloved daily. Fewer nurses in the workforce also mean higher stress for those who remain. This increased level of stress could impact the job they’re doing as well.
For employers and healthcare facilities, offsetting nurse stress can lead to some pretty clear positive results. In addition to implementing factors to help combat nurse stress, compassion fatigue and burnout, enlisting in the help of a healthcare staffing company can give facilities access to more workers.
A combination of staff and short-term staff allows leaders and managers to continue to deliver quality patient care experiences. These types of staffing solutions give facilities access to fill in nurses for shorter-term assignments, utilizing travel and per diem nurses. This not only a way to combat staffing challenges, but it also offers flexible scheduling to your current staff, something that is in leading demand.
Implement a Long-Term Strategy
Some staffing partners may also be able to offer additional process improvements like vendor management, managed services, or more automated systems for billing or scheduling.
A healthcare managed services provider (MSP) can help you set a customized, long-term strategy to help you overcome nurse staffing shortages and other unforeseen challenges. A reliable MSP partner can help raise the quality of your workforce management. The efficiency offered by streamlined, automated workforce solutions can help relieve front-line workers from redundant tasks and free them to focus more on patient care.
In addition to workforce management, MSP offers a chance to upgrade and streamline a healthcare organization’s vendor management system (VMS), allowing for better-organized electronic healthcare record (EHR) systems. This can help ensure that workers have faster, easier access to critical patient data — a key component in ensuring fast response times and delivering a more positive patient care experience.
CareerStaff Can Help
Healthcare facilities that are engaged in quality improvement activities aimed at improving the patient experience need to make sure their staffing levels are optimal.
At CareerStaff Unlimited, we specialize in helping healthcare organizations and facilities overcome workforce challenges and achieve successful clinical staffing plans. We help by providing access to a network of healthcare professionals and the support you need to make sure your staffing level is adequate in order to preserve patient satisfaction.
If you’re interested in learning more about how we can help your facility, contact us today to set up a consultation and to learn more about how we can assist you with your staffing requirements. You can also request contingency staff now.