Best Practices?

We have been doing patient rounding where we go see the patients and ask a few questions like, was your housekeeper friendly, was your room cleaned satisfactorily, is there anything we can do for you? We get good feedback and has helped our HCAHPS and Press Ganey scores.

Recently I’ve started using workers that have restrictions to the point where I can not work them, but they can walk, talk and write come in for ES Ambassador duty. I give them some scripting, a clipboard and the rounding questions and have them spend hours going to talk with patients. We talk about our goal of having their room always clean, how the survey works, and so on. I’ve had very positive feedback on this and it helps get the staff back to work with a better attitude.

I’ve increased our cross training and we all know how that helps. I’ve also moved staff more frequently to play to their strengths more than I have done in the past.

I put a large communication board in our common room. This happens to be our laundry and storeroom area where we check in and out the keys and pagers. During our standup meetings I share Press Ganey positive comments and other good comments and post them on our communication board. The increased focus on the score has helped I believe.

So far my HCAHPS score for the first quarter of 2009 is running 81%. This is a 10 point improvement over last years average, and higher over just November and December of last year.

What things have you all been doing to raise your scores and your staff satisfaction?