Patient Satisfaction & Healthcare

A paper released by Drs. Cheryl Rathert and Douglas R. May titled “ Health care work environments, employee satisfaction, and patient safety: Care provider perspectives ” talks of a study set out to discover how to reduce medical errors in hospitals and healthcare clinics.

The number of errors that occur regularly in the healthcare industry is exceedingly high, and despite the best efforts to reduce these numbers, it appears to have stayed steady with no sign of dropping. So Rathert and May decided to look at a method of reducing medical errors. They suggested what they refer to in the article as “Patient Centered Care.”

The idea of patient centeredness comes directly from the corporate world. It is the idea of customer satisfaction and loyalty, focusing on feedback from the customer in order to make business decisions and find ways to improve the strength of the business and its relationship with consumers. Patient centered care works the same way.

It encourages healthcare clinics to take feedback directly from patients – finding out their satisfaction levels, their perceptions, their needs, etc., in order to focus their attention on the actions that would most benefit the patients and the future of the company. In other words, a patient centered focus would be one where the patients are influencing the decisions, rather than the insurance agencies, doctors, or established ROI practices.

The authors noted studies that showed that while staffing was important, one of the bigger issues with how effective a hospital was at treating patients with limited staff was on management. Further, research showed that customer service oriented companies tended to show greater organizational outcomes and a far healthier corporate culture – something that could ideally transfer over to the healthcare industry as well.

Finally, when nurses were interacting well with patients, satisfaction outcomes tended to be much higher, especially when these nurses were equipped with the tools they needed to complete their work effectively. It was with that in mind that the researchers decided to put the theory that a patient centered focus would be beneficial for the healthcare field. They hoped to find that a patient centered climate would promote job satisfaction in such a way that it would decrease errors.

The findings of this study will be discussed in an upcoming article. Related Blog Part 2