Question

Competency

Evaluate the role and importance of patient satisfaction.

Course Scenario

Chaparral Regional Hospital is a small, urban hospital of approximately 60 beds, and offers the following:

• Emergency room services
• Intensive care
• Surgical care
• Obstetrics
• Diagnostic services
• Some rehabilitation therapies
• Inpatient pharmacy services
• Geriatric services
• Consumer physician referral services

Recently, the CEO has been hearing complaints from both patients and staff, varying from long wait times to rude physicians. You have been hired to design and implement a Quality Improvement Plan to help uncover quality problems and to satisfactorily resolve them.

Scenario Continued

You started inviting various members of the organization to join you in the QI development team. You received an email back from the Chief Financial Officer who questioned the value of surveying patient satisfaction. You must craft an email response to her explaining the role of patient satisfaction in quality improvement and why it is important.

Instructions

Your email should use proper email formatting (including subject line description) and contain language appropriate to the receiver.

Emails are typically formatted in the following way:

1. Begin with a greeting
2. Thank the recipient
3. State your purpose
4. Add your closing remarks
5. End with a closing

Although an email does not typically include citations, you may have to provide support for your statements, particularly those that involve numerical statistics and quotes from other sources. You would cite this per APA in your email.

APA formatting for the email, and proper grammar, punctuation, and form is required.

Answer 1

Patient-centered care is defined as providing care that is respectful of and responsive to individual patient preferences, needs, and values and ensuring that patient values guide all clinical decisions.

Patient-centered care can help in:

-Responding and being sensitive to patients unique needs

-Responding to concerns and complaints

-Emotional and spiritual needs

-Communication Quality - informing, involving, and explaining to patients as well as displaying concern and caring

*Patient satisfaction is the difference between the perception of services and expectation

-Evaluation vs expectancy

-it is specific to the type of medical care/treatment

-Used to assess the quality of health care

The importance of measuring patient satisfaction is to :

-Identify any problem areas

-improve the quality of care

-Assessing the impact of satisfaction on adherence

*The satisfaction can be measured by:

-Focus group

-Certain types of interview(Phone or in person)

-Questionaries/surveys

-Anecdotal records

-Thank you letters/complaints

-Some types of scales

*The quality care can be assessed through :

-Patient health outcomes

-Patient safety measures

-Patient satisfaction

-Delivery of quality care

-Equity in care

The main principles of quality management, total quality management, continuous quality improvement, statistical process control, and performance improvement are to assess and improvement of work processes while focusing on what customers want and need