Help with d/c callbacks!

Why are these calls being made? I know, I know..patient satisfaction, right? Well if I had been in the ED, I would have been sick/injured enough I wouldn't want you bothering me!

I think the ER at my facility has nurses attempt to call back their own patients when feasible. If busy, they get a tech to do it or the secretary. The unit manager also does them as well. They try to have someone on the patient's care team do the call back though.

We have secretarial staff do our callbacks. When our nurses do callbacks, we aren't allowed to give advice over the phone, so they have our secretary do it. Our callbacks are scripted

One pediatric hospital I know has outreach RNs who do their calls.

callbacks are stupid. I can't be responsible for a patient when they go home. And i don't have time for that nonsense. Sorry but that's just another customer service pile of crap.

If management wants this done, there should be a cust svc dept handling these calls (cheaper by the hour than nurses and possibly techs). I imagine at least 1/2 of my er patients would have a list of physical ailments to talk me up about, and I would never get off the phone! Besides, seems like an objective person would be better suited to find out how a pt truly feels about their care, not the nurse who cared for them. We are way too busy in our er to even dream of doing this. At least I HOPE our hospital knows this!

I have done callbacks, loosely scripted. The conclusions I've taken away from doing this:

1. About 15% of patients have not provided an accurate, working phone number.

2. Most calls are less than 4 minutes in length.

3. The overwhelming majority of calls are very positive to neutral in tone - many comments along the lines of "that's nice of you to call - I wouldn't have expected that."

4. These cannot be done by staff who are physically present on the unit / with active assignments. These need to be done by staff who have some other quiet space for this activity who have no other responsibilities at the moment. And an individual ED either has the budget/staff to allow for this ... or they don't.

5. And last but perhaps most importantly: I don't think calls really alter satisfaction/perception of the experience for the patient who doesn't get what they wanted.