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By Elena Demosthenous
Having competitive and successful healthcare businesses is important not only for the people, but also for the economy, especially in countries where services and tourism are the major sources of income, like Cyprus.
Healthcare providers, especially hospitals, invest a lot to maintain their image, try to recruit the best medical staff, and use the best equipment. All these happen at a time when they must also be cost conscious. However, are these enough? What about the patients’ satisfaction through their experience?
Patients nowadays desire high quality service particularly as health care costs rise. Today’s healthcare consumers seek value, and their satisfaction is critical to the hospitals’ growth and success, because when patients are satisfied there is a significant reduction of the professional liability risk exposure. By focusing on patient satisfaction strategies, healthcare providers can enhance their services to avert potential malpractice claims, since happy patients do not want to sue. When one looks at that and how much litigation costs, and then looks at how much it costs to keep patients satisfied, the latter costs significantly less.
Nevertheless, this is a big challenge since the experience a patient goes through is a complex assembly of multiple interdependent processes. These processes can be grouped under four categories: Referral/Access, Registration/Admission, Treatment/Care and Discharge/Exit. Each one of these groups includes a combination of tangible factors (physical and environmental facilities) and intangible factors (organisational/interpersonal factors) that interactively contribute to the patients’ overall experience and satisfaction.
Intangible factors are usually the ones that are left behind or not given enough attention. Patient dissatisfaction often is a result of their inadequacy when at the same time satisfied patients justify their satisfaction based on those intangible factors.
Implementation of hospital accreditation standards is a very valuable tool to achieve patient satisfaction by covering these intangible factors, and by identifying and setting requirements for all the above processes. For example:
– Consistency and uniformity are important elements and provide a feeling of security and reassurance that staff knows their job. This is why evidence of clearly defined and consistent procedures regarding all medical and administrative processes increase patients’ satisfaction and perception of the level of quality received.
– Patients can easily distinguish between well trained and content staff and staff that lack knowledge and experience. Friendliness and courtesy are surely non negotiable qualities when working in healthcare and it is the responsibility of a hospital’s management to provide for its development, improvement and assessment.
– Patients have rights and issues like privacy and confidentiality, medical records, valid consents, etc. are very important. Patients need to feel that these rights are recognised and respected. It is on one the hand reassuring for them and on the other it creates a feeling of credibility for the hospital.
– Information and proper communication is also critical and has a direct impact on patients’ satisfaction. With the emphasis on transparency and quality reporting in healthcare, the patient becomes an informed consumer, with increased needs and demands: in order to meet them, hospitals should have processes in place to ensure straight forward communication so that patients receive all information related to their rights, condition and treatment, possible risks and follow-up actions. Additionally, the quality of patient-doctor interaction is negatively correlated with complaints in lots of surveys, whereas positive interaction is linked with fewer professional liability claims.
– The way patients’ individual needs are addressed can have an extremely negative or positive impact on a patient’s experience. These needs may include special medical conditions, disabilities, language and cultural differences, etc. It would be completely erroneous for a hospital to ignore these, especially if one considers the emotional stress patients sometimes go through.
– Even at the exit of a hospital there are things that affect patients’ satisfaction. Timely and efficient discharging is highly appreciated whereas delays and mistakes in the financial settlements are frustrating. Moreover patients’ satisfaction depends a lot on whether they feel really cared for, or asked to give feedback on the services received, share their complaints, suggestions etc.
Indeed, keeping patients satisfied is not an easy and simplified situation because healthcare provision is a complicated, process, but also because patients and their needs can be so similar and at the same time so different. Keeping patients satisfied is about processes and culture developed within the organisation, involving all kinds of people and staff, continuously growing and adjusting to changes and patients’ needs, and at the same time surviving in a very competitive market. As mentioned above, implementation of hospital accreditation standards can greatly assist in achieving this.
Elena Demosthenous is a chemist, working as a Standardisation Officer at the Cyprus Organisation for Standardisation (CYS).
