November 2005
In this issue:
1. CMS Releases HCAHPS Survey
2. Success Story: Redefining Customer Serivce
3. 2005 Annual Conference - Attendees Get Ideas for Creating Excellence in Healthcare
4. Making the Grade - When Patients Speak Administrators Pay Attention
5. Ask the Experts - Percentile Rankings
6. Around the Office - Halloween Celebration
CMS Releases HCAHPS Survey
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services today released for comment its final Hospital CAHPS survey instrument, the first national survey to collect uniform patient feedback on hospital care. The AHA-backed survey will be implemented next year as part of the Hospital Quality Alliance, the public-private collaborative whose members include the AHA and other key national stakeholders. CMS will publish the survey in Monday’s Federal Register and accept comments through Dec. 7. Participation by hospitals will be voluntary, and results ultimately will be publicly reported on the Department of Health and Human Services’ Hospital Compare Web site at www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov. More information on the HCAHPS survey and on HQA is available at the CMS Web site.
CMS Web site
Success Story: Redefining Customer Service: Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital Hamilton
Customer service in healthcare organizations is critical to the patients and is among the key drivers for every consumer measurement. Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital Hamilton (RWJ Hamilton) has conducted community surveys for many years. As recently as 1998, the hospital had some opportunities for improvement. Today, they have become a model for outstanding patient care and customer service.
Full Article
2005 Annual Conference - Attendees Get Ideas for Creating Excellence in Healthcare
To thrive, hospitals must simultaneously strive for the strongest market position, highest productivity, the best patient satisfaction scores and a strong bottom line. The Jackson Organization’s 2005 Conference Creating Excellence in Healthcare, at the fabulous Kingsmill Resort in Williamsburg, Virginia, was a fantastic success in helping healthcare administrators achieve these challenging—yet attainable!—goals.
This year’s opening session was presented by Linda H. Aiken, Ph.D., R.N. Her presentation, ‘The Impact of Nurse Work Environment on Nurse Job Satisfaction, Patient Satisfaction, and Quality of Hospital Care,’ really drove home the importance of nurses in healthcare, the issues nurses face, and how to address those issues.
“Nurses are to Hospitals like Phones are to Communication—essential. But we have a looming nurse shortage, and nurses are among the most dissatisfied of all professions, with 41% stating they are dissatisfied with their jobs,” said Dr. Aiken. She provided quantifiable evidence that the improved clinical outcomes, reduced turnover, and increased satisfaction scores made hiring more nurses cheaper than getting by with less. “By creating good working environments, providing adequate staffing, and putting a strong focus on nurse education, more than 40,000 lives could be saved each year.”
The breakout sessions provided not only great insights and best practices, but they also provided a model for how presentations should be done. Packed with humor, energy, music, video, hard numbers, and actionable recommendations, clients were quite impressed with their experiences. Each session provided a constant flow of best practices, new ideas, and great recommendations.
The conference was wrapped up by noted speaker and author, Adrian Gostick of O.C. Tanner. A leading authority on employee recognition, Mr. Gostick took the enthusiastic crowd on a wild journey through the most effective ways to recognize employees. He hammered home the need to praise effort and reward results—and to recognize more than the person; recognize the values they manifest.
Stay tuned, as The Jackson Organization is already preparing for next year’s conference!
The Jackson Organization in the News: Making the Grade — When Patients Speak, Hospital Administrators Pay Attention
Gage Dexter weighed 7 pounds, 8 ounces when he entered the world in a suite in the Wesley BirthCare Center.
Kim Lavy, Gage's mother, says she liked the care she got at Wesley. The nurses were nice and the birth suite was comfortable and spacious, offering plenty of room for bonding with her newborn.
Kim says if she has another baby, she'll be back. That sort of satisfaction and loyalty is what hospital executives hope to hear as they battle for market share in the highly competitive health care industry. Satisfied patients are more likely to feel they received quality care and will pass that opinion to others.
Full Article
Ask the Experts: Percentile Rankings
“Could you please help us explain our percentile rankings to our employees? Some are having a hard time understanding how a 4.21 for pain management in our Maternity Unit put us in a relatively low percentile, but in Orthopedics a 4.21 put us in a high percentile.”
An attribute's national database average differs by the unit surveyed. In other words, patients across America receiving service in a maternity unit have rated pain management differently than patients receiving service in an orthopedics unit. Why? That's a very complex question, but it has a lot to do with the type of procedure, expectations going in, and how relevant that particular attribute is with respect to the service received.
The Jackson Organization compares your results to our robust national databases for each patient-experience variable. The Jackson Organization’s databases allow you to drill down to highly specific areas within your organization. For example, your Orthopedics units are compared to the scores of all Orthopedics units in our database, rather than to all Inpatients. This allows for much more meaningful comparisons and effective goal-setting.
Due to the fact that the National Average for pain management among patients having visited a maternity unit is 4.21, and that among patients having visited an orthopedics unit it is 3.95, a rating of 4.21 received by a particular hospital's maternity and orthopedics units would produce very different percentile rankings.
This situation is seen in many areas of life—for example, a first grader reading at the same level as a fifth grader would be quite high on the charts. However, a fifth grader reading at a fifth grade level would not be seen nearly as impressive as the gifted first grader.
Around the Office - Halloween Celebration
The Jackson Organization’s Fun Committee helped put together a wild Halloween celebration. We’ve got the pictures to prove it! Our judges chose winners in the following categories: Most Beautiful, Scariest, Funniest, Most Creative, and “What were you thinking?”
Bobbi Rogers, our Fun Committee Chair and Product Manager, offers the following recommendations for putting on a successful holiday celebration:
• Planning should involve as many departments as possible. “Our Fun Committee is made up of people in every department. This ensures that everybody has a voice and all departments feel like part of a family.”
• Think about where and when. “It is important to take care of all departments and all shifts. Whenever possible, celebrations should occur in a place and time that covers the most employees—and where not possible, do something special. Plan ahead to have extra snacks and refreshments for them, and make sure that something is organized for everybody.”
• Recognize and Reward! “Even though dressing up in a costume isn’t seen as ‘work’ by many, you should recognize and reward the employees that take the time to be part of making work fun.”
Fun is a requirement around here—which is why we have a dedicated Fun Committee to keep things lively. At our most recent annual conference, our clients kept saying over and over again, “You all seem to really like each other!” and “The fun is contagious!” We really love what we do and who we work with—and we understand how fun can take an organization to amazing heights.