Improving the Patient Experience

HCAHPS is here and your patient satisfaction scores will be on display to the world (including patients, competitors, community and the media).  Are your caregivers ready to be graded on their interactions with patients, including their communication skills, responsiveness, empathy and courteousness? 

In this 2-day seminar, you’ll learn the concrete skills that your caregivers need in order to improve the patient experience and successfully meet the challenges of HCAHPS and other patient satisfaction initiatives.

Immediately improve patient-caregiver interactions
Strategic changes can help improve patient satisfaction (e.g. task forces, rounding, thank you notes, etc.).  But HCAHPS scores are largely driven by very specific face-to-face interactions (e.g. how nurses and physicians talk and listen to patients).  And the only way to significantly raise those scores is to give your professionals better tools for speaking and listening.  This seminar is the only program available in healthcare that focuses on specific and tactical face-to-face interaction skills.

Canned scripts are not enough
Smart, educated professionals just don’t react well to being given canned scripts.  To be blunt, they often find it demeaning.  So instead, they need methodologies and tools that they can adapt and integrate with their professional judgment in unique situations.  This 2-day seminar called Improving the Patient Experience gives you intelligent tools designed for immediate implementation.  You can transform your patients’ experience almost immediately by simply understanding the most important caregiver-patient interactions and managing them effectively.

Bring your team
Every executive and manager with responsibility for improving the patient experience should attend this program.  You’ll get the tools to teach all the caregivers in your organization.  Bring your whole team and accelerate your improvement efforts when you return home.

Here's what you'll learn...

• Recent research shows that inpatient satisfaction is driven most powerfully by effective communication, empathic interactions, caregiver responsiveness and emotional intelligence.  So how do you translate that into a concrete improvement plan?  In this session you’ll learn the specific caregiver-patient interactions that most significantly drive your HCAHPS and patient satisfaction scores (and thus where you should be focusing your improvement efforts). 

• Understanding patients’ emotional needs is one of the biggest drivers of patient satisfaction scores.  But too many caregivers find understanding and incorporating “emotional needs” into treatment plans and daily interactions a difficult challenge.  You’ll learn a model for quickly assessing the emotional needs of patients (and their families) on an easy-to-understand continuum.  And we’ll show you how to respond to their needs with the appropriate mix of adequate communication, good decision-making, and respect and compassion.

• Not every patient wants their nurse to hold their hand and “feel their pain.”  Some patients want cold hard facts.  Others want to know every detail and a step-by-step roadmap of their treatment.  Still others want to skip all that and “cut to the chase” to get their prognosis.  People typically have one of 4 distinct communication styles: Factual, Logistical, Personal and Strategic.  If you give the wrong information to the wrong style, your message won’t get heard and the patient will get frustrated or even angry.  In this session you’ll learn how to identify those 4 styles with your patients and families and give them the right information such that they actually hear it.

• Miscommunications or long delays do not necessarily guarantee poor patient satisfaction scores, if your caregivers know how to react quickly to those events.  You’ll learn how to give your caregivers a “service recovery mindset” with specific tools for reframing service breakdowns into opportunities for a deeper connection with the patient.  We’ll also show you the science of how caregivers can use targeted apologizing to sincerely provide an opportunity for correction without undermining the patients’ confidence in them.

• The very first HCAHPS question asks “how often did nurses treat you with courtesy and respect?”  Nurses and other caregivers are the most caring people in the world.  But with staffing shortages, regulatory pressures, and more, it’s too easy for patients to feel like they’re not getting the courtesy and respect they desire.  You’ll learn exactly what drives patient’s perceptions of courtesy and respect and techniques for quickly transforming their perceptions.

• There at least 4 generations present in every hospital workforce and patient population (including Traditionalists, Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y).  But each of these generations speaks, listens and interacts in radically different ways.  Based on our study of generational differences (one of the largest ever conducted) we’ll show you how to meet the needs and expectations of these 4 generations.  You’ll also learn how to improve communication across your multi-generational workforce and teach them how to make a deeper connection with patients from generations other than theirs.

• Many hospitals have terrific safety initiatives.  But they don’t get credit for them if the patient does know of, or understand, them.  You’ll learn how to educate patients about key safety initiatives and procedures in ways that patients will understand and appreciate.  We’ll show you how to encourage patients and their families to be involved in their healthcare, and how to help them establish a dialogue with providers.

• Not only do many professionals dislike scripting, but it’s also practically impossible to memorize 101 scripts for every possible contingency.  Instead caregivers can develop their “emotional intelligence” which equips them with the intuitive and interactive ability to connect with every patient, regardless of the specific situation.  You’ll learn the 5 components of honing and developing emotional intelligence and how to teach these abilities to your caregivers.

• People’s interest in healthcare, and especially their local hospital, grows with every bit of data they get. You can fight that transparency or embrace it and use it to your advantage in the marketplace.  In this module we’ll show you how to distill your patient satisfaction & HCAHPS scores into an understandable measure for your local media and community.  You’ll learn PR strategies to discuss low scores, improvement initiatives, and prevent misinterpretation of the HCAHPS initiative.