Nursing’s Ultimate Guide to Productivity and Satisfaction

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Nurses who communicate well with their coworkers tend to witness an improvement in morale as well as job satisfaction. A article titled the Effective Interpersonal Communication: A Practical Guide to Improve Your Life reiterates the negative effects of poor workplace communication.

High turnover rates, increased stress, and lower morale and job satisfaction are among the many downsides. Not everyone is a natural communicator, and even the best communicators can benefit from additional training and insight. Due to the important clinical, emotional and psychological benefits for nurses and patients, many online RN to BSN programs are now incorporating communication training into their curricula. Coursework in professional interpersonal communication — including written and verbal techniques — can help prepare nurses for the workplace.

Empowering Education: A New Model for In-service Training of Nursing Staff

While the significance of verbal communication is well understood, the necessity to use clear and concise written communication is often underestimated. With the rise of electronic medical records, malpractice lawsuits and insurance denials, it has become increasingly important for nurses to fully document patient encounters and treatment plans. Those who study the role of communication and its effects on interpersonal relationships are expected to have a distinct advantage upon entering the field.

Students should have the opportunity to evaluate various techniques and apply those in the classroom and clinical settings. Nurse-patient interactions must be handled with care, and students need to learn how to approach different scenarios. For example, nurses should refrain from overwhelming the patient with irrelevant details or complex language. Learning to communicate at the level of the listener, whether a patient, caregiver, or another nurse or healthcare provider, is a crucial concept.

Nurses have a multitude of responsibilities when it comes to patient care. Arguably, communication tops the list. Nurses act as the hub of communication, relaying and interpreting information between physicians, caregivers, family members and patients. It seems to me that unhurried and through nursing care may be of better financial benefit. Compassion, kindness and desire to be of service are the driving forces behind my nursing career choice.

I appreciate the science of nursing and the income but the real reason I became a nurse is for the love of my fellow human beings. I have begun to feel frustrated and powerless, trapped by a business model that does not allow me to work to my fullest potential -- a business model which does not honor the needs of our patients and their families. I feel powerless working for an industry which seems to value profit above compassionate human care and needs!

But I am not powerless, I have a voice, and I will use my voice to advocate for manageable workloads in the best interests of our patients, their families, myself, and the community I serve. Tap here to turn on desktop notifications to get the news sent straight to you. Portrait of a young nurse with her team in the background.

To incentivize health systems to implement these goals, CMS created ways to reward innovation related to how these strategies are implemented across health systems. Each of the six priority areas within the CMS Quality Strategy is an opportunity to engage patients, caregivers, and families, thereby bringing the experience of care into the quality equation. The Affordable Care Act Office of the Legislative Counsel, called for provisions that would improve outcomes of healthcare through a series of requirements designed to assure quality reporting for such processes as effective case management, care coordination, chronic disease management, and others.

Thus began a major focus on the development of measurement sets designed to collect and report on the quality of evidence-based clinical care within healthcare institutions. Not only would the system measure quality, it was designed to eventually reimburse services based on quality outcomes.

As the provisions of the ACA have become integrated into regulation within health system reform and into care environments themselves, more specific measures for concept of patient experience have been developed. As the provisions of the ACA Office of the Legislative Counsel, have become integrated into regulation within health system reform and into care environments themselves, more specific measures for the concept of patient experience have been developed.

The set of measures for ACOs to capture patient experience includes: The National Quality Forum has included measures specific for patient experience with psychiatric care as well. As noted, since the Affordable Care Act became law in , considerable activity by healthcare leaders has taken place to develop ways to measure quality outcomes.

Equal effort has been underway within healthcare systems to address the delivery of quality care. The establishment and utilization of systems to reimburse providers and institutions based on quality performance is also well underway. Quality, efficiency, and affordability of healthcare have become the conceptual umbrella for a system that will pay for the provision of healthcare based on the quality of patient care. One of the precursors to health system reform involving metrics associated with improving care was the development of specific aims to guide the work of quality.

Without a focus on all three at the system level, outcomes may be less than desirable. They described a system in balance as goals are pursued with a focus on ethics, equity across populations, and specific strategies to assure that the pursuit of one aim in isolation would not adversely impact the other aims. We might imagine how initiatives within a healthcare setting could have an unsettling impact on patient experience if, for example, cost cutting measures reduced the ratio of nurses to patients. Equally variable and complex is the experience that an individual has with the healthcare they receive.

Much of the literature that describes how patients view their healthcare experience has focused on patient satisfaction. The next section will briefly describe selected literature to illustrate challenges related to terminology and measuring the complexity of the patient experience and patient satisfaction with care. The literature reports studies that use both terms, but rarely defines either patient satisfaction or patient experience.

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Perhaps this is because each term seems to be defined by the factors used to measure it. This section describes selected research that demonstrates the interchangeability and variability of terminology, illustrating the lack of conceptual clarity that can challenge accurate measurement. The purpose of HCAHPS is to standardize the collection of data to measure patient perspectives on hospital care through a survey instrument.

These factors are organized into nine topical areas: A number of studies whose purpose was to understand the response of patients to their hospital experiences utilized the HCAHPS survey to collect data. The terms patient satisfaction and perceptions of the hospital experience are multidimensional terms and, in a sense, are characterized by the items in the HCAHPS survey such as communication with nurses and the responsiveness of staff.

Two examples of this type of research are studies developed by a team of researchers who have explored factors in acute care settings that are associated with patient satisfaction. Kahn, Iannuzzi, Stassen, Bankey, and Gestring studied patients in trauma and acute care surgery settings to investigate predictors of patient satisfaction as measured by the HCAHPS survey. Their findings indicated that patient perception of interactions with the healthcare team strongly predicted patient satisfaction.

Other factors associated with satisfaction included speedy responsiveness of staff, the hospital environment, and pain control. Similar findings were reported by Iannuzzi et al. In this study, clinical complications in particular were associated with patient satisfaction scores, and although a number of other factors were associated with patient satisfaction, provider communication was the strongest predictor of high satisfaction.

Results showed that physician-patient communication during the preoperative experience was predictive of satisfaction. Patient satisfaction contributing to patient experience.

They described the situation of patients weighing the service received against their expectation. If the service exceeds expectations, they judge quality to be high; the reverse is true if the care is below expectations. All of these dynamics impact how satisfied patients are with their experience of what they encounter in healthcare. Their satisfaction may or may not actually be related to whether they received quality care or whether they had good clinical outcomes.

Patient satisfaction and reimbursement. Johnston expressed concerns about the utilization of patient satisfaction scores to judge the performance of physicians or its use as a metric for reimbursing physicians for care. Johnston described an encounter with a patient receiving palliative care where the patient and the physician had different approaches and expectations about facing end of life.

These differences led to a less than satisfactory experience on the part of the patient, even though the physician used an evidence-based approach. The experience of this patient was very different from his expectation and equally distressing for the physician. Neither were very satisfied.

Johnston also suggested that linking patient satisfaction to physician payment creates a dilemma for the provider who knows that a particular treatment may not lead to a satisfied patient or family. The opposite view was reported by Riskind, Fossey, and Brill based on their belief that patient satisfaction, while time consuming, can have a positive effect on the success of a medical practice. Their premise was that increased patient satisfaction, and the ability to measure those results, created a climate where providers began to understand that a successful medical practice was influenced by how satisfied their patients were.

Benchmarking patient satisfaction goals to physician accountability enabled this practice to directly educate providers on the correlation among higher patient satisfaction and profitability, increased market share, employee and physician productivity, retention, and reduction of malpractice lawsuits. Evaluate patient experience to determine patient satisfaction.

The list of criticisms included such ideas as:.

Experiences that providers and patients have during a healthcare encounter seem to capture not just the clinical aspects of care, but many other non-clinical aspects that further illustrate the complexity of measurement of these concepts. What are those conditions within a healthcare encounter, particularly within a hospital environment, that may impact the patient experience and, therefore, his or her satisfaction?

The Benefits of Communication

Examples of these may include: Each of these conditions is discussed briefly below in the context of selected research studies. Predictors of patient satisfaction, patient perception and health related failures.

Jackson, Chamberlin, and Kroenke examined the predictors of patient satisfaction in a general medical clinic.

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