Knowing What Nurses Want: Nurse Satisfaction... do you agree with Press Ganey survey?

Home Health Columnist / Guide · May 19, 2004

78% of nurses satisfied with employers "Customer focus"??

Hope when facilities think of "customers" they focus on

1. How each department is a customer: we all interact and need sevices from one another.

Examples:

a. Good service is delivering meal trays on time with the corectly ordered menu, bringing extra tray with a smile to a late arrival.

b. Providing a second Pleur Evac requested from supply area at 4:25 AM cause first one was cracked upon setup within 15 minutes, not 2 hours later.

c. Nursing taking report at 10:30 PM on ER admit and not snarling cause completing end of shift paperwork.

2. Our patients/clients are customers BUT don't have total say in how a facility is run: Patients have rights ALONG with responsibilities.

pickledpepperRN · May 20, 2004

I agree in general with the survey.

I would add "If it ain't broke, don't break it"

Has your administration tries some change only to have to revert to the previous efficient way?

We nurses adapt to new scientific advancements in medications, surgeries, technology, and treatments. We monitor changes in our patients response to illness and treatment plan, teach, and reassure.

So WHY make us adapt to an unnecessary change?

Oh, and please don't make an announcement at a staff meeting about some big change without input from direct care nurses.

rnmaven · May 23, 2004

I think that the Press-Ganey study is interesting information and at least is an attempt to explore the issues regarding workplace and job satisfaction for nurses. In general, when I look at the patient satisfaction work I see from Press-Ganey I feel that they provide us with useful data but don't necessarily explore the issues behind their findings. In other words how does nurse:patient ratios impact patient satisfaction? How many "satisfied" patients even complete the survey?

I usually tell nurses who are living through a full-blown Press-Ganey survey to look at the website for Press-Ganey and ask the hospital administrators who paid for these surveys to be done.....where are the nurses? In other words, from my experience, I haven't seen nurses working for Press-Ganey so I question the interpretation of the data without a nursing perspective. I certainly understand that the data is the data......however, I believe that without a nursing background, organizational development people lack the insight necessary to truely understand what's behind the data.

I recently conducted research on Sense of belonging and job retention in registered nurses. It was a pilot study for the research component of my MSN program. The findings were that there was a correlation between a nurse's sense of belonging and their job retention. This may be related to how a given institution or nurse manager fosters the feelings of sense of belonging in their staff. If you create a work environment for nurses where they feel they "belong" they may stay at that institution.

We hear alot of "talk" about how important this issue is to nursing administrators. I think it will be interesting to see how my data is received by the nursing adminstation community as I intend to try to publish this study and present it at future nurse executive meetings.

fairyprincess2003 · May 28, 2004

ok, I think that

catcolalex · May 30, 2004

did anyone notice that the thing nurses were least satisfied with was Pay? Im much more satisfied now as an agency nurse than as a staff nurse. I still work in the same area and do the same things in the same situations. its esier to be happy when you make twice as much money.