As has been said by many regarding the opinions of patients, their perception is reality. When it comes to the patient’s perception of waits at your hospital, your opinion—even if backed up by hard data—doesn’t hold much sway. If a patient feels like they waited an hour and a half in the outpatient waiting room, then it is the same as if they actually waited an hour and a half, regardless of what the timestamps say.
Charles Flinn, CEO and Jan Bednar, Patient Care Manager of St. Clare’s Health System were among the award winners and presenters at HealthStream Research’s 2006 Creating Excellence in Healthcare annual conference. When measuring the impact of changes to the outpatient services in an effort to reduce wait times, they knew that they had to improve the reality and perception of wait times. To do this, they began using the patients’ self-reported wait times as their metric to gauge success. Their efforts to improve perceptions of wait times were successful. By utilizing their Fast Track resources for outpatients in the first part of the day (when Fast Track was being underutilized), the patients’ actual wait times were reduced by 69%, and the perception of wait times improved considerably as well.
The benefits of their new outpatient process serves as a perfect model for reducing the perception of long waits by patients:
- Hospital staff comes to the patient—not the other way around. With this approach, patients won’t get lost and staff can make sure all tests are completed. Furthermore, constant human companionship goes a long way in reducing perceived wait times. Patients are taken to where they need to go.
- Improved signage. There are few situations that seem more time-consuming than being lost. When patients are lost, their satisfactions levels are unlikely to increase. To address this, St. Clare’s has begun using layman’s terms for signs and have moved away from sole reliance on color coding. Using shapes on signs allows the color-blind and illiterate to understand the signs.
- Improved Parking. You could have the best hospital in the world with the fastest outpatient turnaround in the history of medicine—but if your patients have to spend 45 minutes to find parking, they are not likely to rate your hospital as having short wait times. Patients begin forming opinions of your hospital the moment they enter the parking lot, so be sure to address any and all problems with parking. An interesting side-note to this story: St. Clare’s really did reduce the actual wait times and improved outpatient turnaround; all by itself, this improvement lead to faster turnaround for the parking lot as well. An expansion to parking had been planned, but with improved turnaround this was no longer needed.
Patients don’t mind the passage of time nearly as much as they mind the unproductive passage of time. Give them human contact. Put internet access in the waiting room. Make sure there is always reading material available, and please make sure that the “reading material” is more than just pamphlets about diseases. And certainly make sure that a patient—any patient—is never left waiting around wondering what’s going to happen next and when it’s going to happen. Knowledge can improve perception quite effectively, so inform your patients of what will happen when.