Press Gainey AARRGGHH

I'm with you, I think that's totally out of line.

This is crazy ...

Patients/families cannot be expected to know where the "little things" fit into the larger scheme of their care, especially when an emergent medical condition is involved. They are having an **emergency** which is why they've sought out professional medical care, right?????

How many times have you & your coworkers swiftly initiated care on a patient with chest pain or stroke symptoms (someone's getting clothes off, someone's attaching EKG leads, someone else is getting ready to start a line, etc.) only to hear a family member wail "ohh, you're taking off his clothes and it's so chilly in here!"

Warm is nice, warm is good, and will be taken care of AFTER the EKG and other interventions that give me the best chance of having the means to ensure the best possible outcome.

Seriously, the answers to the question "how can I provide the best possible care" will be the comfort-oriented things that are nice, kind, caring things, but not the things that have a significant impact on the patient's outcome. A family member will not answer, "well, it would be great if you could successfully manage to get some fluid into my 89-year old mom with CHF whose BP is currently 78/43 and is dehydrated due to 3 days of n/v/d ... without putting her into fluid overload."

I'm alll about warm blankets & comfort care, but if that were all that were required, families would keep their loved ones at home. They've come to the ER, so I can only proceed on the premise that they wish something more advanced to be done.

OK ... little bit of a vent there ... thanks for letting me vent. Didn't mean to hijack the thread.

Yeah, I know....we just had our PG scores posted on our hospital's intranet website. Interesting comments by the patients. Under the doctors' heading, all the comments were about how caring and wonderful the care had been. Under the nurses' heading, the comments were substantially complaints about how long it took to be treated. so what's up with that?

We're inpatient and got a complaint on Press-Gainey that we were bothering them too much at night. Well, ok, we'll just stop going in the room at night, because Lord knows patients don't go bad at night!

We send out these Press Gainey surverys to our patients after they been in the ICU uhh... hello? The majority of these pts (who survive to be d/c'd) receiving the ICU scorecards were sedated/intubated for the majority of their stay in our unit. I doubt they recall the answer to the all important question: "Was the temperature of your room comfortable?"

This survery drives me nuts.

Management just wants to say they addressed the issue by initiating a new policy that way they wipe their hands of the problem and place it onto the nursing staff.

This sounds ridiculous IMO...sounds like those restaurants that are required to ask if you want desert and they wear little buttons saying "If I don't offer you desert then desert is on the house".

So they are supplying you with buttons right?

Plain ridiculous

Just another attempt to control healthcare via the long arm of Uncle Sam. No matter what industry you are in when you involve "consultants" its always just a money drain so that the powers to be cant pass on a raise to their employees. Our merit raises are tied into PG"FOS" scores. We havent gotten them in two years. Imagine that !!!!!!