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Satisfaction for All: Your Patients, Your Nursing Staff & Your Organization

The trend in healthcare is customer satisfaction with service. Patients were once considered recipients of health care; now patients are recognized as healthcare consumers.  Providers of care must deliver safe, quality health care in order to stay competitive in today’s market.  Research supports the concept that patient satisfaction is an important indicator of quality of care and that nursing care has a prominent role in patient satisfaction which has a notable influence on overall perceptions of quality of care.

A team of triage nurses in a busy tertiary women’s health facility recently created and implemented a patient satisfaction survey.  The purpose of the survey is multifaceted; it can assist in identifying unmet care needs or patient expectations and perceptions of healthcare leading to potential performance improvement for nursing staff.  The survey can also be useful for benchmarking and making strategic decisions within the department, along with providing information on the performance measurements requested by local, state, federal and commercial organizations.

Obstacles to administering the survey developed that included nurses’ negative attitudes towards the survey and consistency with handing out the survey.  This guided the team to identify strategies to optimize communication and explore innovations to improve the implementation of the satisfaction survey. Development of a scientific methodology to analyze and interpret the collected data has been another necessary step in the survey process.  

Patient satisfaction with nursing care is an evolving concept, consequently frequent evaluations and strategy changes are being made in this triage department.  Further considerations regarding tactics for patient recovery, means for increasing the number of survey responses, and the need for a standardized national survey are currently underway.

Nurses are the key to providing the “hospitality” of healthcare that engages patients positively and emotionally, thus it is important for nurses to listen to patients as valued customers and concentrate on their expectations about the quality of care.  The challenge for health care in today’s competitive market is to find ways to help patients and their families transcend the usual routine care into an experience of emotional connections with the hospital staff, specifically their nurse.  This women’s health triage unit is finding ways to face this challenge through a patient satisfaction survey.