How Can I Raise Patient Satisfaction

Question We would like to print cards with our logo and some phrase/mission/value statement to be used for patient service recovery. One program we are looking at is writing a personal note to the patient...

Question We are confused. We have very good scores on cleanliness in our inpatient areas, but have been unable to move the needle in our outpatient areas. What can we do? Answer First, review the...

Question Our scores for food temperatures have been in the mid 80s. Do you know of other organizations that have improved their scores? Do you have pointers in how we can script our staff so...

Question What are the essentials of a great waiting room experience in an outpatient setting? Answer We believe these actions are essential to a great waiting room experience and so we call them the five...

Question We would like some ideas about how to achieve 90th percentile patient satisfaction for meals while maintaining a productivity benchmark of 25 percent. Answer First, it is definitely possible to achieve above the 90th...

Question I have been challenged to develop a top 10 list of appropriate responses to a patient’s request that a nurse can use when she is too busy or working with a more critical patient....

Question I am co-leader of the Inpatient/Outpatient Team. What is the best way to implement call light responses and improve response time? Answer Responding well to call lights is an important quality and risk issue....

Question We completed an internal survey targeting those areas that support staff in taking care of patients. One area that scored particularly low was human resources. They were concerned when they saw a mean score...

Question Let me first say my staff is great! I just cannot seem to get the buy in on bedside registration in the ED. Thanks for any suggestions you may have. Answer First, ask the...

Question Sometimes, once the decision has been made to admit the patient to an inpatient bed, there is not a bed available. It can take hours to get the patient to the unit. Some nurses...

Question I am an ED nurse in a mostly chaotic emergency department. Our manager and medical director have recently attended one of your seminars and converted to your philosophy. Our ED historically has an overall...

Question We are developing our Service Teams, which include several areas like patient, employee, volunteer, and physician satisfaction. Is there a sequence to follow? Should we focus the majority of our energy on employee satisfaction...

Question Our hospital has used a four-point satisfaction scale for the last decade. However, we are really working on our key drivers of satisfaction. I feel that the four-point scale will not really show our...

Question What is the legitimate role of a patient relations department? In my job, patient relations reports to me. I also have human resources, the volunteers, pastoral care, and operations improvement (Six Sigma approach). You...

Question I would like to encourage my patients to participate in the patient satisfaction survey they receive when discharged. What type of strategies do we use to prevent it from appearing that we are, as...

Question At our hospital we have low staff buy in and ownership of the patient satisfaction surveys. The process doesn’t mean anything to the staff. I would like to know things that managers can do...

Question As an institution, our strategic planning objective for this year is to improve our patient satisfaction scores. Our most recent overall ranking is in the 29th percentile. We want to set a goal for...

Question Can you achieve 100 percent patient satisfaction? Can you measure it? Answer My experience tells me that there will not be a time when 100 percent of your patients will rate their care tops...

Question Our patient satisfaction is low—with scores in the mid-twenties or below. I want to address this, but I’m just not sure where to start. What do you recommend? Answer I recommend you begin by...