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Category: Patient Experience

What is your hospital doing to keep nurses happy?

By Jeannie on Jan 20, 2012 in Featured, Healthcare Staffing, Patient Experience, Travel Nurses, Working with Staffing Vendors

With the current nurse shortage, it’s no surprise that hospitals should be doing all they can to keep their nurses happy.

Maintaining an environment where the nurse wants to work is critical for not only nurse retention, but also patient quality. The overall stress accompanied by an uncomfortable and disrespectful work environment can send nurses running for the door. The key is finding out what makes nurses happy enough to stay.

The Nursing Organizations Alliance developed a set of principles to help hospitals and other health care entities create positive work environments. More than 40 nurse organizations have endorsed these principles. So, what are you doing to keep your nurses happy?

Solve the nursing shortage by caring for patients?

By Jeff on Nov 06, 2009 in Featured, Hospital Staffing, Patient Experience

I just read an article about an initiative in New Jersey led by the New Jersey Hospital Association’s Institute for Quality and Patient Safety, in partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation aimed at educating and supporting nurses so they can increase the amount of time they spend at with patients and in the process improving their job satisfaction. In turn this should help address the nursing shortage by stopping or at least slowing down the leaving of nurses from the profession.

The hope is that by giving nurses, particularly more experienced ones, a chance to stay connected to patient care they will stay passionate about caring for others and stay in the profession. The program is receiving a substantial funding of a $732,000 grant and will focus on three goals:

Give performance improvement education and training for front-line staff nurses to help give them the tools needed to make improvements in their units and determine and test changes in their units

Give staff nurses the ability and power to make changes needed to improve how much time is spent on direct care in their unit

Make training and education available for nurse managers so they can help facilitate their nurses’ work and make the leadership decisions needed to make positive changes to the way their unit works

I must admit I had never thought about this connection before, that of nurse satisfaction improving the closer a nurse can get back to delivering patient care. This is very understandable. The extra duties that that get added to nurses’ jobs are most often not what motivated them to get into nursing in the first place. So why not address the burnout problem by letting them do what drew them to the profession in the first place.

What about your state or hospital for that matter? Are there any initiatives underway to help nurses get closer to the patient? What about on a more micro-level? What are you doing in your nursing units?

What can you learn about the patient experience from dolls?

By Jeff on Oct 31, 2009 in Featured, Patient Experience

A lot apparently.

In an article about the patient experience from HealthLeaders Media, Gar Crispell, general manager for American Girl, talked about the ways that the American Girl Doll Hospital works to provide a great patient experience for the dolls that visit it and their owners. One thing that the article mentions is their consistency and how they strive to delight with each interaction. If you want to see what that kind of patient experience brings just go to YouTube and look at all the “American Girl Doll back from the hospital videos” are out there. These are little girls who love their dolls and take the time to film and upload a video about it when they get them back.

Here is a video of a little girl as she gets one of her dolls back from the hospital. Imagine if your patients and their family’s got that excited about their stay with you.

And here is a blog post from the mom of a little girl whose doll visited the American Girl Doll Hospital, read it and the comments and you will see what their focus on patient experience can do.

The people at the American Girl Doll Hospital are able to do this without knowing a lot about their patients. But as nurses and nurse managers who have the ability to talk to and learn about your patients your job should be much easier. Great patient experience only comes from one place. The hospital staff and most often those on the front line of providing that experience are nurses. And the happier the nurses the better the patient experience. So as a nurse manager what are you doing to help make your nurses happy and teach them to pass that on to your hospital’s patients?

Gel (Good Experience Live) Conference Promotes the Patient Experience

By Jeff on Oct 10, 2009 in Featured, Hospital Staffing, Patient Experience

I posted about this over at TravelNursingBlogs.com too, but thought it would also be worth mentioning here too.

The Gel (Good Experience Live) Conference is on Thursday, October 22, 2009 (and optional 2nd day: Fri, Oct 23) in New York City. It brings experts on the patient experience together to put on a series of talks on the patient experience, focusing especially on:

Who’s improving it?
How are they improving it?
What approaches are being taken in various healthcare disciplines?

This is the conference’s seventh year. It looks like a great list of speakers will be there, so if you’re in the New York City area you should check it out.

Here is a video made available from last years conference.

Bridget Duffy at Gel 2008 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.