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oh my gosh, i wish we could think of some way to squash press ganey ! seems to me it is a company that makes a lot of money making our lives more difficult as well as costing the health care system a tremendous amt of money. i get it, that medical care is very competative these days. but really ..... come on .... enough is enough! i do not understand why admin thinks that pg is the beat all end all of pt care satisfaction. it seems to justifie abuse to nurses. now if you ask admin they will say, " we do not tolerate verbal or physical abuse of our staff at any time" may i just say bs!!! we are abused constantley i am called names in our er that i can't even say here. we do not have security in the lobby with us. pt's are pretty much free to say and do as they please. if i went into mcdonalds and said such things to the staff we would be thrown out, yet mcdonalds is wounderful at coustomer satisfaction. pg may work for kroger or macy's but not for hospitals. when are admin going to get some guts and stand up and say, enough is enough !!! we can only do so much as nurses. seems we are more worried about what someone thinks of us than we are caring for their illness. can't we come up with a better and less expensive way to make sure pt's have good care.:redbeathe we really do care for our pt's and want the best for them. i want to be sure they are pain free and have a warm blanket..... but i'm sick of the abuse being tolereated in the name of pt satisfaction. i have found that to score high, a prescription of percocet is required. ( not 5 or ten---- it has to be at leat 20) if you give naprosyn, the score is low. therefore doc's give out a tremendous amt of narcs. yesterday i had a 4 bed er assignment for 12 hours and i gave 20 prescrips for percs and 20 mg of dilaudid, and one 30mg toradol. no tylenol and not a motrin in sight. how much do you want to bet the ones who got percs give good comments and the one who was ticked off about the motrin gives all bad comments. one nurse was saying that there is a hospital in our area that is making the rn call the pt at home to appoligize if their name is mentioned in pg survey. can they do that ? i think i would have to talk to a lawyer if i were fired for refusing such a request.
I was reading a list of complaints from my former hospital's PG surveys.. 99% of them were...not enough sports channels, food is bad, curtains are dingy, MD didn't spend much time with them, "old" looking decor...COME ON now, this is NOT the Four Seasons.
Nor are they nursing isses and nurses shouldn't be dinged for things they can't and don't control. We don't even have PG and I get infuriated for fellow nurses, etc. that have to put up with it.
My unit just got the worst scores in the hospital. 1%.........what I don't like is that during that quarter we had 10 trached patients, 10 sitter patients, low staff because of the holidays and vacations. So less staff and higher acuity - to me it's a no brainer our PG scorse tanked. But do you think administration understands this? No we're under pressure, having meetings, etc. and I just just want to scream.
What I also hate is that we were rated by patients and families as "good", but that still puts us in the 1% range. It's a shame that being rated "good" is considered failure by administration.
The problem is the boss's boss, by that I mean the board of directors of a hospital. They are mostly businessmen and they understand selling shoes and cabbages and Happy Meals. They do not understand health care. They do not understand that keeping people safe is very much different than giving the impression you are keeping people safe. And they don't understand that the needs of one "customer" who is going bad on you can legitimately wind up meaning that the other "customers" got no personal attention or the little "Would you like some more iced tea?" "I hope you have enjoyed your stay here at I Have the Time Land." As long as the businessmen in charge are doing all the talking and none of the listening, Press Ganey will rule.
The problem is the boss's boss, by that I mean the board of directors of a hospital. They are mostly businessmen and they understand selling shoes and cabbages and Happy Meals. They do not understand health care. They do not understand that keeping people safe is very much different than giving the impression you are keeping people safe. And they don't understand that the needs of one "customer" who is going bad on you can legitimately wind up meaning that the other "customers" got no personal attention or the little "Would you like some more iced tea?" "I hope you have enjoyed your stay here at I Have the Time Land." As long as the businessmen in charge are doing all the talking and none of the listening, Press Ganey will rule.
I get a long with GNs for some reason. Maybe cause I dont talk down to them when they ask a question. I just answer the specifics of the question and let them work things out in their own mind. Most of the time my 13 week contract is ended and I am moving on, I get a card or two from new nurses.
I hear a lot of new nurses say "I get the impression that this place is about "giving the impression of wellness" more so than actually trying to make people well.
At each job, at least two GNs say something of this effect to me. I dont egg on negative impressions either, they dont need me speeding up the burn out process. But jeez, these nurses have been at it for.......oh, three weeks (counting only the time they are taking pts alone) and already are forming opinions of this nature.
Also, I've seen pts who dont want to go home (and shouldnt, because certain things have not been addressed) and raise a fuss when the doctor tells them its the day of D/C. I've seen the supervisor step in and talk to the pt., probably trying to save a PG score. They throw in all kinds of frills to make the pt. happy (free taxi ride home ticket, a personalized meal before leaving) but still send them on their way before things are attended too (my BS's are still out of control, I needed O2 at night here but dont have home O2 etc...). The pt. gets a rush from the personal attention from a supervisor, forgets about the health issues that bothered them, and goes home. Then they return the next week.
Its the impression of care, not giving care.
Press Ganey is a waste of time. It pretty much just gives management something to do, so they will have something to discuss with the staff in meetings. It is funny how nurses get treated like crap and need support, but Press Ganey doesn't measure that . I mean really. I give Press Ganey a thumbs down.
mawlvn
23 Posts
Press Ganey is and has always been a tool for management to use how they choose. If you have a management where positive scores are useful to their overall goal this can be gleaned from the report, the opposite is also true. In the whole a Press Ganey report means nothing. It becomes valuable in the interpretation. This is driven by the end goal of that interpreter. In other words it means many things to many and nothing to the welfare of patients.