In the current year, the patient satisfaction rate of the medical and surgical departments has significantly decreased and amounted to 44%. As a result, the overall sense of satisfaction with patient services throughout the facility has also declined. In addition, patient satisfaction is considered a key indicator of all health care quality, so it is very important to monitor and constantly improve the quality of services provided. Patients in the ward feel that the medical staff do not have enough time to listen to and care for clients fully, so they seem unprofessional. The problem is that there are many new employees in the hospital whose implementation needs to be improved. Thus, it is necessary to develop a quality improvement plan and increase the satisfaction rate to 88% and above, but the unit has limited finances.
Communication plays the most important role between the leader (nurses and other staff) and the recipient of services (patients). Appropriate communication skills can help patients improve their condition, improve their psychological well-being and gain satisfaction (Gaggioli et al., 2018). In addition, minimizing the waiting time for communication and response to patient concerns will also increase patient satisfaction.
The importance of professional communication of hospital staff with patients and their families is manifested in the level of their satisfaction with the care received. Lack of communication can lead to distrust in the patient-nurse relationship (Kubzansky et al., 2018). Researches have shown that communication between patients and healthcare professionals can influence treatment outcomes and patient behavior.
The Patient Satisfaction Scale is a questionnaire of approximately 30 items, where a higher score indicates high satisfaction and a low score indicates dissatisfaction. The quality of communication between medical staff and patients and the knowledge and ability to apply the skills of verbal and non-verbal communication with patients can also be assessed by a questionnaire (Prybutok, 2018). Estimation of patient waiting time is carried out quantitatively by establishing the time from the moment when the patient turned to the medical staff until the moment when he or she received a response.
Surveys on patient satisfaction and the quality of communication between medical staff and patients should be conducted in two stages: before the start of implementation and after the completion of the plan. Based on the study results, it is possible to analyze the data obtained to develop a more accurate plan to improve patient satisfaction in the future. Senior staff should monitor satisfaction indicators observed by nurses and doctors, such as:
- takes into account my opinions and preferences regarding my care plans,
- a better understanding of the needs of the patient,
- make sure the patient understands the importance of their treatment,
- make patients feel like n individual.
To improve communication skills, it is necessary to conduct training in which the importance of verbal and non-verbal communication and its correct use will be indicated. In addition, to reduce the patient’s waiting time for a response from the medical staff, strategies have been implemented to reduce the breaks of the medical staff. It was replaced with a single sheet of filling in information with a simpler option, also to save time.
During the implementation of the change, the staff was not satisfied with the plan. The medical staff notes that too little time has been allocated to implement the plan, and the workload has also been increased by reducing the break time. Moreover, some junior employees do not understand the importance of implementing the plan.
At the end of the implementation period of the provided plan, a control survey was conducted. As a result, it became known that the satisfaction rates for each stage became higher in different proportions. There was a significant reduction in the waiting time for a response by patients; the indicators became higher by 19%. Additionally, patient satisfaction in professional communication between medical staff and clients has increased by 12%. Thus, after implementation, patient satisfaction rates increased to 75%.
The medical staff was motivated by additional payments for outstanding performance during the implementation process. However, since the unit has limited finances, the payments were small, which did not contribute to the strong activation of workers.
The goal was not fully achieved, so the final implementation evaluation was postponed for another two months until May 2022 inclusive.
Patients believed that the medical staff did not have time to care or listen, but after the implementation, they became more satisfied in terms of the time given to them by the medical staff. It was expected that with the increased awareness of the importance of the basics of communication among employees, the opinion of the professional level of the medical-surgical department would also increase, but the indicators increased slightly.
The study results showed that employees did not pay enough attention to professional communication between the patient and the medical staff, as the score slightly increased. Hospital managers and nursing staff should re-prioritize their activities and reform and improve hospital staff communication and patient satisfaction at the forefront of their activities (Real et al., 2017). Thus, staff training, identification of motivating factors, and dissatisfaction factors will increase patient satisfaction.
Reference
Gaggioli, A., Riva, G., Peters, D., & Calvo, R. A. (2018). Positive technology, computing, and design: Shaping a future in which technology promotes psychological well-being. Emotions and Affect in Human Factors and Human-Computer Interaction, 477–502. Web.
Kubzansky, L. D., Huffman, J. C., Boehm, J. K., Hernandez, R., Kim, E. S., Koga, H. K., Feig, E. H., Lloyd-Jones, D. M., Seligman, M. E. P., & Labarthe, D. R. (2018). Positive psychological well-being and cardiovascular disease. Journal of the American College of Cardiology, 72(12), 1382–1396. Web.
Prybutok, G. L. (2018). Ninety to nothing: A PDSA Quality Improvement Project. International Journal of Health Care Quality Assurance, 31(4), 361–372. Web.
Real, K., Bardach, S. H., & Bardach, D. R. (2017). The role of the built environment: How decentralized nurse stations shape communication, patient care processes, and patient outcomes. Health Communication, 32(12), 1557–1570. Web.