Why this measure is important:
- This measure represents Cincinnati Children’s strategy to capture when patient and family experience does not meet expectations and acknowledges that even one dissatisfied family is too many.
- In addition to knowing when patients and families rate our care as excellent, we also want to track the percentages that do not. With this information we can ask additional questions to better understand the source of this dissatisfaction and work at the unit or system level to make corrections.
How we measure:
- We calculate the percent of respondents who gave Cincinnati Children’s low responses (any score between 0 and 6 out of a possible 10) to a single question about overall quality of care. Data are collected from the following areas: Inpatient, Outpatient, Emergency Department / Urgent Care, Perioperative / Outpatient Surgery and Home Health Care.
What we are doing to improve:
All improvement efforts are directly related to feedback received through the patient satisfaction survey process. We highly value what our patients and families say, and we use this valuable information to improve the care we provide and enhance the experience of those served.
Inpatient
- Inpatient improvement teams are working to identify and minimize potential patient experience failures by using brief team meetings known as “huddles” to review, predict, and plan for potentially dissatisfied families. This process is guided by data from our satisfaction survey process, where known triggers associated with dissatisfaction have been identified.
- Units are testing different methods of communicating and posting a patient’s daily plan of care in language that is easy to understand.
Outpatient
- Outpatient improvement teams are working to reliably identify patients and families who have waited too long in clinics and are in the process of testing various ways to decrease wait time.
- Outpatient teams are also testing the effectiveness of small huddle meetings before outpatient clinics begin as a way to improve communication and planning and to address safety, staffing, flow, and experience concerns.
- Improvement teams are working closely with the Family Advisory Council to better understand family expectations and to solicit feedback on specific interventions.
Emergency Department (ED) / Urgent Care
- ED teams are also using small staff huddles to identify which families have a high potential for being dissatisfied. The team works to develop plans in advance that can decrease the likelihood of these families being dissatisfied.
- To help decrease the “unknowns” associated with visits to the Emergency Department, teams are working on a visual aid that describes how patients flow through the care process during their ED visit and show families where they currently are in this flow.
- Lastly, teams at our Liberty location are working closely with families to better understand their expectations related to their care experience. This helps us plan in advance how best to meet them.
Perioperative / Outpatient Surgery
- This team is working on how best to address pain management for patients, families, and caregivers, both immediately following surgery as well as after the patient has gone home. These efforts have resulted in revisions to the patient handbook so as to give everyone involved a better understanding of the protocols and expectations related to managing pain.
Home Health Care
- The Durable Medical Equipment team is working on improving communication throughout the process of building custom wheel chairs. As with the other interventions described above, this helps establish expectations related to service and delivery of this equipment and decreases the element of the “unknown” as it relates to care needs.
View the Operational Definition: Patient Satisfaction