St. Vincent Mercy Medical Center - Toledo, Ohio
Compass Award Winner: Inpatient Services 450+ Beds
St. Vincent Mercy Medical Center is a 427-bed, urban hospital that recorded 20,922 patient admissions and 64,692 emergency department visits in 2007.
Area of Focus
In St. Vincent Mercy Medical Center’s effort to improve patient satisfaction, we focused on staff providing personal attention and meeting the individual patient needs in a timely manner. We know that our patients come to us with a basic expectation that they will receive appropriate and effective clinical care. To ensure that they have a positive overall experience, we strive to provide more than just high quality care. Our opportunity to increase the likelihood that they will rate their care “very good,” as opposed to simply “good,” lies in meeting their needs in a caring manner.
Actionable Steps
The following three improvement initiatives have had a tremendous impact on the patient experience at St. Vincent Mercy Medical Center.
Leader Rounding—Department leaders round on patients to introduce themselves and ask if the patient’s needs are being met. This makes patients feel important. Leaders also round on employees to ensure that they have everything they need to do their jobs. Resulting improvements in employee satisfaction carry over into increased patient satisfaction.
Hourly rounding—Front-line care providers round on their patients on an hourly basis. They check to see if the patient is in any pain, needs a position change, or requires any assistance with hygiene. In addition, they also ask how we are doing in our effort to provide “very good care.”
White boards—Each patient has a white, dry-erase board on which we ask them to write what “very good care” means to them. Leaders and front-line staff, when rounding, say, “I see that this is what very good care means to you. How are we doing?” These boards have proven to be an incredibly valuable communication tool that enables any member of the health care team to address patients’ needs and desires.
ROI
Staff satisfaction is evident in St. Vincent’s low nurse turnover rate of 7.3 percent and negligible nurse vacancy rate of 0.9 percent. In addition, patient satisfaction has climbed since we implemented the Leader Rounding, Hourly Rounding, and White Boards. For the period of January to June 2007, our mean score for the “Overall Rating of Care” was 87.3. For the same period in 2008, it was 90.6. From January to June 2007, our mean score for “Likelihood to Recommend” was 63.3. For the same period in 2008, it was 70.2. These notable increases are the result of hardwiring these new practices.