Patient Survey's Opinions Please....

[neuro9]

I'm curious what the rest of you think about a situation at the hospital where I work. I work in a 700+ bed hospital. 2,400+ "professional employee's". We are the largest hospital. The next largest is a 600+ bed hospital 2,000 employee's. We have four other smaller hospital's in the area. The patient's get a phone call after discharge in regards to their care while they were hospitalized. Some of the patient's receive a survey via mail asking about the care.

The entire staff had to attend meetings with the President of the hospital the last two weeks. I believe the meetings were held for the most part in regards to the survey results. The president basically said the ratings are not acceptable, and we needed to shape up or medicare/medicaid funding could be cut. This would mean layoffs, if things don't improve. The impression I got was that the employee's are responsible for the low ratings.

We have the usual complaints every hospital gets. Noise, rude people, not enough private rooms, short staff, bad food, rude doctors, long waits for tests, etc. We were compared to the other large hospital, and one of the smaller hospitals. The four area's that got the most negative comments in all three hospitals were Neurology, Vascular, Orthopedics and Neuro intermediate/stepdown. All the other area's, in all the other hospitals including ours were rated higher.

I just think it's interesting that ALL THREE hospitals were rated lower in ALL FOUR areas!

Any idea's/thought's on this? Thanks!

I take pride in our hospital and feel we all work very hard!

[UnionRN2]

Sounds like Press Ganey strikes again. There are a few threads on here about Press Ganey. It is best just to ignore the bull they spew. Anyone who REALLY does the work in healthcare can tell you what bull the surveys are. Of course the administrators don't have a clue. They are too busy counting their beans and trying to figure out how to get more beans.

[baylor06]

I've found that just simple communicating with patients can help with this quite a bit! Sometimes just a simple reason, ie I don't know what time your x-Ray will be done because the ED is really packed today with emergent cases, etc. Just let them know that you remember they are there and everyone is working very hard to help them. I think that a lot of dissatisfaction comes from being left out of the loop- just communicate! At the same time, no excuses! An acknowledgement from staff is often enough to help calm patient's anxiety and impatience.

[HouTx, BSN, MSN, EdD]

maybe your administrator wasn't very diplomatic about it, but he was telling the absolute truth about patient satisfaction and reimbursement. i am surprised you have not heard about hcahps before now. development began in 2002. it stands for hospital consumer assessment of healthcare providers and systems. it's is a standardized survey that is being used to collect information about patient satisfaction.

cms rolled out the hcahps survey in 2008, and now the information is being made available to the public so that (theoretically) people will be able to compare hospitals. www.hcahpsonline.org. all hospitals that receive reimbursement from cms (basically all acute care hospitals) have to submit their quality information, including hcahps data in order to receive their full reimbursement for services that they provide. any hospital that fails to provide data is penalized by 2% at this time. as time goes on, more and more reimbursement is going to be tied to hcahps scores. crappy scores will result in less and less reimbursement. great scores will be rewarded with higher reimbursement.

since cms survey data is basically only produced on an annual basis, a hospital may discover that they have problems when it is too late to do anything about it. so, hospitals use ongoing patient satisfaction surveys (like press ganey) to analyze where they are on an ongoing basis and (hopefully) fix problems before they affect reimbursement. it's an opportunity to make sure that everyone understands: happy nurses = happy patients. and this time, it has a dramatic affect on the bottom line.

at every organization i have ever worked for, everyone responds the same way to their pt sat scores... if they aren't so good. everyone says - "we're special", "no one has the difficult/complicated/hard to please patients that we see". but that is not true. the hospitals you are being compared with are just like yours. if their patients are more satisfied, it's because they are doing a better job of delivering what patients want.

we all know that patients are not the best judge of quality care... they are more impressed with ammenities and decor. but this is the reality that we have to deal with so complaining isn't going to help. if we (nurses) want to become more powerful and influential - we need to show that we really are the most important part of any hospital.

[neuro9]

I'm not debating the patient survey's at all! I don't think I made myself clear. I'm interested in opinions on why ALL THREE local hospital's have the lowest scores in the SAME departments. The departments are.....Neuro, Neuro Stepdown, Ortho and Vascular. All the other departments seem to be doing OK in all three hospitals!

Thanks!