Sensitivity issues top patient satisfaction list
Sensitivity issues top patient satisfaction list
Looking to increase the level of patient satisfaction at your health system? If so, have the medical staff show more sympathy and sensitivity toward patients.
That’s the result in a nutshell of a survey that asked more than one million patients what factors they considered most important when deciding whether to recommend a hospital.
Hotel characteristics not important
The survey, conducted by Press, Ganey Associates Inc., shows that "hotel characteristics" such as food quality or noise level are not as important as sensitivity, privacy, and empathy, says Dennis Kaldenberg, PhD, manager of research and development for the South Bend, IN, company specializing in patient satisfaction measurement. "Connecting with the patient as a person and respecting the patient’s personal needs are clearly more important than things like the food, the room, or the speed of admission," Kaldenberg says.
Health system administrators that give short shrift to patient satisfaction do so at their own peril, Kaldenberg adds. "There is a relationship between patients’ perception of care and the organization’s financial performance," Kaldenberg adds. "Organizations that have higher patient satisfaction scores tend to be the organizations that perform better financially."
The top 10 issues cited by patients that generate satisfaction and correlate with the likelihood of recommending the hospital were the following:
1. Staff sensitivity to the inconvenience that health problems and hospitalization can cause.
2. Overall cheerfulness of the hospital.
3. Staff concern for patient privacy.
4. Amount of attention paid to patients’ special or personal needs.
5. Degree to which the nurses take patients’ health problems seriously.
6. Technical skill of the nurses.
7. Nurses’ attitude toward patients buzzing them.
8. Degree to which nurses keep patients informed about tests, treatment, and equipment.
9. Friendliness of the nurses.
10. Promptness in responding to the call button.
The five aspects of hospital care that patients identified as least important were as follows:
• Speed of admissions process.
• Noise level in and around room.
• Quality of the food.
• Likelihood of getting the food you checked off on the menu.
• Room temperature.
A mistake that hospitals commonly make is to address the "quick fixes," typically the items found at the bottom of the importance list, says Rodney Ganey, PhD, co-director of Press, Ganey. "Patients expect less of hospital food and accommodations and do not allow dissatisfaction with these areas to mask the importance of other issues," Ganey says. "In other words, patients will make do’ with marginal amenities but not with impersonal or insensitive care."
The survey was conducted at 545 hospitals in 44 states.
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