Becker's Clinical Quality & Infection Control

23 PATIENT & CAREGIVER EXPERIENCE Patient experience is rebounding, but our work is not over By Rick Evans, Senior Vice President of Patient Services and Chief Experience Officer of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital A s we move into fall and see third quarter patient survey results come in, it is a good time to take stock of where things are with regard to recovering the patient experience in our organizations. At NewYork-Presbyterian, we have seen a strong rebound in our ratings as the year has unfolded, aer a very challenging start in the first quarter. To what do we credit our improvement? ere are two main factors. One is a robust and ongoing effort to recruit and retain staff. e patient experience crisis we weathered last year was definitely linked, along with other factors, to an unprecedented staffing crisis. Hospitals across the country experienced dramatic staffing challenges during the Omicron surge at the end of last year and the start of 2022. is, coupled with pandemic fatigue and the "Great Resignation," fueled a historic drop in patient experience metrics nationwide. With each passing month in 2022, we have begun to achieve stability in our staffing and meaningfully restore presence at the bedside. at, in turn, has helped us find our feet again with the patient experience. is work is not finished, but we are making progress. Good patient experience and its essential components — empathy, connection and communication — require this important staffing foundation to be in place. Our patient experience team has partnered with our operations leaders and human resources colleagues as never before. It is critical that we track staffing together because it helps us choose both the content and pace of our patient experience recovery work. e second factor has been a disciplined and relentless pursuit of strategies to both recover proven patient experience best practices and to innovate in that same space. For example, we have restored and broadened nurse leader rounding, reestablishing and expanding a critical touchpoint that connects the dots for our patients and families. is is real work for our nurse leaders, and we are grateful for their effort. We have also restructured our approach for making discharge calls to once again assure we are reaching out to close to 100 percent of our patients. As we look at this expansion of rounds and calls, we see a correlating rise in key aspects of the experience like nurse communication, communication about medications and discharge planning. Our strategy also includes leveraging technology to create more touch points and augment communication. is includes optimizing our in- room television systems to supplement and facilitate patient education and leveraging our EMR at the bedside to bolster communication touchpoints. While it is too early to draw definitive conclusions, we believe we are seeing the first green shoots of the benefit of this work, both in patient ratings and in staff engagement and satisfaction. rough the work described above, we believe our ever-expanding strategy is also driving our recovery. While we are happy with this progress, old and new challenges present themselves. One is the fact that the pandemic, despite our fervent desire for it to be otherwise, continues to ripple through our institutions. Across the country, we are still seeing significant COVID-19 patient loads and virus spread. Along with that comes familiar, but still vexing, effects on patient experience, including restrictions on visitation, burdensome screening requirements and supply chain issues. We are experiencing More physicians observing colleagues behaving badly: 6 report findings By Cailey Gleeson F orty-one percent of physicians have seen other clinicians behave inappropriately in the workplace, up from 35 percent in 2021, Medscape's 2022 "Physicians Behaving Badly: Stress and Hardship Trigger Misconduct" report found. The report, published Aug. 19, surveyed more than 1,500 physicians about misconduct they've observed among their colleagues. Respondents were asked to identify observed misbehaviors in the last five years and which misbehaviors they saw most recently. Six findings: 1. Eighty-six percent of physicians said they saw colleagues bullying or harassing other clinicians and staff in the past five years, and 30 percent said they saw it more recently. 2. Forty-five percent of physicians said they saw colleagues bullying or harassing patients in the past five years, and 5 percent said they saw it more recently.` 3. Eighty-two percent of physicians said they saw colleagues disparaging patients unbeknownst to the patients in the past five years, and 30 percent said they saw it more recently. 4. Fifty-five percent of physicians said they heard colleagues using racist language in the past five years, and 9 percent said they heard it more recently. 5. Forty-four percent of physicians said they saw colleagues becoming physically aggressive with patients, other clinicians and staff, and 6 percent said they saw it more recently. 6. Eighty-five percent of physicians responded "no" when asked if they have behaved poorly as physicians in the last year. n

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