NoBlood

Are Your Patients Satisfied or Loyal?

On March 31st 2003, the Health Care Advisory Board stated that, “hospital margins are recovering slowly ………and without aggressive hospital efforts, margins will likely improve only modestly during the next few years.� Thus health care institutions continue to focus on patient census as a means of stabilizing or improving a hospital’s bottom line.

Health care providers hear a lot about ‘patient satisfaction’ today. Hospitals focus on employee behavior, the aesthetic environment of the facility and services provided in an effort to keep patients returning to their facility. However, Fred Lee, president of a leadership-training firm, wrote an article in the April 2003, “Trustee� highlighting the point that while patient satisfaction may be the result of one hospital stay, it may not guarantee that the patient will return. Thus, he concludes, “hospitals and staff must make patients’ visits memorable – not simply satisfactory – to ensure loyalty.� In the field of Bloodless Medicine and Surgery, as more hospitals choose to provide this specialty, coordinators will be faced with a similar challenge. How will you ensure a patient’s desire to return to your facility? What sets your program apart from others in your city or locale?

The answer may, in part, be what the patient remembers. Have you ever experienced a patient’s appreciation expressed by sending you a thank you note, sending a gift or referring your program to a friend in need of medical care? They did this because they have a story about their experience at your hospital. It may have been the time the coordinator took to educate the patient on anemia, or the arrangements the coordinator made for additional help in the home, but whatever it was, to the patient, it was memorable and most likely, an uplifting experience. Just as a patient will remember and have a story about a dissatisfied experience, they will also do the same with a memorable experience. How do we create those ‘memorable’ experiences?

Again, referring to Mr. Lee’s article, a study of patient review surveys indicate that competence and courtesy may evoke a satisfied response, but the quality that motivated a patient to be loyal was compassion. The article defines this quality as, ‘a talent that is generally not taught or instructed; it is a quality that comes from one’s imagination and empathy for others.’ Thus, as a bloodless coordinator, you may be competent and courtesy, but do you have the quality of compassion? And do you reward the compassionate acts of others? When one of your colleagues shows a compassionate behavior, do you acknowledge their act? As part of a health care team your modeling often instills and promotes the same values in others.

So ask yourself the following: How can I show compassion to my patients? Do I identify with their situation? Does my compassionate acts move others to be compassionate? If you can answer yes to those questions then, to that end, you have instilled loyalty in your patients, because you took the time to make their hospital stay a memorable one, a story that they will always love to tell.

Submitted by: Sharon Vernon, RN