A Rock-Solid Safety Lesson
Resource → Blog • Added on Jul 2, 2019
Health care leaders attending the Press Ganey 2019 Safety & High Reliability Executive Summit last month in Denver received a gift of magnetite to remind them of their responsibility to continuously direct and set the course to a safety culture.
Reflecting on the Virginia Beach Shooting: Lessons for the Health Care Workplace
Resource → Blog • Added on Jun 20, 2019
Hospitals and health care organizations can look to each other as well as other industries and workplaces to learn how to best prepare, respond to, and prevent violent incidents. Leadership cannot prepare or anticipate every situation, but they can reduce injuries and assaults in the health care workplace if they continue to seek out and implement measures for protecting their team members and patients.
The Road to Transformation: What Adult Medicine Can Learn from Pediatrics
Resource → Blog • Added on May 7, 2019
To progress along their transformational journeys, adult care organizations can learn and adapt strategies from leading pediatric hospitals to create an organizational culture that supports true patient centeredness. Care coordination, facility design, and integrative medicine are just some areas in which pediatric systems are leading the way to transformation.
Patient Ratios and Extended Shifts Are Separate Nursing Issues
Resource → Blog • Added on Apr 5, 2019
Extended nursing shifts are associated with burnout, job dissatisfaction, negative health consequences, and poorer performance on safety, quality, and patient experience measures. Reducing these shifts and nurturing a safe work environment should be a leadership priority. However, enforcing nursing-to-patient ratios without other considerations is not the solution to mitigate the dangers associated with extended work shifts.
The Role of Pulse and Annual Surveys in Your Workforce Engagement Strategy
Resource → Blog • Added on Feb 21, 2019
Nurturing workforce engagement is not only about making employees happy, it is also about optimizing patient experiences, clinical outcomes, and financial performance. That is why organizations aiming to achieve cross-domain improvement want the wealth of data provided by an engagement strategy that incorporates both annual and pulse surveys. Any organizations looking to implement the latter for “quick fixes” for engagement outcomes should first look for ways to strengthen their relationship with their workforces. In most cases, we don’t need more data—we need to do more with data.
New Podcast Spotlights Good Doctors Doing Great Things
Resource → Blog • Added on Jan 23, 2019
In an era in which the stresses of delivering health care seem relentless and overwhelming, there are physicians seeking solutions to problems above and beyond what they need to do to get through the day. These doctors epitomize resilience. Believing their personal and professional lives may offer insights that could help others enjoy their lives more, Dr. Tom Lee has begun interviewing them for a podcast series, Good Doctors: Stories from the Heart of Health Care, which is set to debut in February.
Workforce Safety Panel: Empowering Caregivers to Speak Up for Safety
Resource → Blog • Added on Dec 18, 2018
In part II of a seven-part series, Press Ganey experts advise health care organizations on a High Reliability journey to aggressively remove barriers and detractions from reporting or speaking up about unsafe practices resulting in errors and harm. To help begin this process, the group identifies those barriers and explains how organizations can protect the physical and psychological safety of patients, families and caregivers.
Workforce Safety Panel: Obstacles to Becoming a High Reliability Workforce
Resource → Blog • Added on Nov 1, 2018
A group of safety and patient experience experts from Press Ganey discuss the progress that health care organizations have made and the next steps required to become as safe as High Reliability Organizations (HROs) in aviation, nuclear power and other industries. In part I of a seven-part series, they consider what the top obstacles are that keep the health care workforce from achieving the same levels of safety as an HRO workforce.
Engagement Matters: Meeting the Unique Challenges of the Health Care Workforce
Resource → Blog • Added on Oct 16, 2018
The factors that influence workforce engagement vary in health care, and may fluctuate further based on employees' functions, roles and departments. A deep understanding of these relationships—and of the uniqueness of the health care workforce—is critical when designing and implementing a successful and sustainable engagement strategy.
Improving Physician Well-Being through EHR Enhancements
Resource → Blog • Added on Sep 12, 2018
Electronic health records (EHRs) have become a major source of discontent for many physicians, translating into lower engagement and patient experience outcomes at some organizations. To address this, Press Ganey CHRO Joe Cabral recommends engaging all stakeholders to improve EHR implementation as Cleveland Clinic has done.
Be a Safety Fanatic
Resource → Blog • Added on Sep 10, 2018
If avoidable harm were a disease, it would be the third leading cause of death in the United States, right after heart disease and cancer. To advance the mission of eliminating preventable harm in health care, we must all become safety fanatics. Together, we can protect patients, support our colleagues and do what is right.
Workforce Engagement: Building a Sustainable Improvement Culture
Resource → Blog • Added on Sep 4, 2018
Achieving transformational change requires an organizational culture that aligns purpose, people and processes. To avoid stagnant improvement as a result of check-the-box exercises, leaders must leverage key internal structures and processes to create and execute effective and sustainable improvement plans.
Why Patients Seek Out Negative Reviews
Resource → Blog • Added on Jul 31, 2018
Negative online reviews can cause angst for physicians. Most fear that anything less than perfectly positive patient reviews will be damaging. Understanding how consumers navigate negative reviews can help to reduce anxiety over occasional outlier comments. The real opportunity is to focus on any emerging patterns from negative comments, and to target those areas for improvement.
Preventing Workplace Violence in Health Care: A Nurse’s Perspective
Resource → Blog • Added on May 22, 2018
Health care workers are more than four times as likely to experience assaults at work that result in injuries requiring time off than any other private sector employees in the United States. Though it may not be surprising, it's not okay. It’s time for health care organizations to make sure their efforts to deliver a positive patient experience do not come at the cost of workforce safety.
National Nurses Week: Celebrating Agents of Transformational Change
Resource → Blog • Added on May 10, 2018
As the largest sector of the health care workforce that is often at the front line of care, nurses play a critical role in delivering safe, high-quality, patient-centered care. For organizations looking to achieve transformational change, engaging and supporting nurses is not optional--it is their duty.
Surgical Services Process Improvement: A Holistic Approach
Resource → Blog • Added on May 3, 2018
Given the interdependency of surgery, patient safety and hospital revenue, surgical services process improvement has become a key strategic priority for many organizations. To achieve meaningful and sustained improvements in quality, productivity and safety, organizations should adopt a holistic approach that focuses on three areas: safety culture, education and process improvement.
Informing and Engaging the Health Care Consumer
Resource → Blog • Added on Apr 10, 2018
New research demonstrates significant discrepancies between the information that appears on third-party physician-review websites and the output from validated patient experience surveys that are used to measure, report and improve outcomes that are meaningful to patients. Organizations that understand the importance of actively managing their online reputations are hosting provider reviews based on valid, reliable patient experience data on their own websites.
BPCI Advanced: The Next Step in the Transition to Value-Based Care
Resource → Blog • Added on Mar 2, 2018
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is leading a journey toward value-based care. For providers who want to accelerate their own journey toward delivering value-based care, they may want to participate in CMS's Bundled Payments for Care Improvement (BPCI) Advanced program.
How 3.6 Million Nurses Are Leading the Nation’s Journey to Better Health
Resource → Blog • Added on Feb 20, 2018
Nurses are role models, educators and advocates for their patients, families, peers and others--yet, they are less healthy than the average American. In response, the American Nurses Foundation has created the Healthy Nurse, Healthy Nation™ Grand Challenge to unite thousands of individuals across the country around one shared goal: to improve the health and wellness of the nation's 3.6 million nurses.
Speaking Up for Safety: The Importance of Reporting Safety Events
Resource → Blog • Added on Jan 2, 2018
Reporting a safety event is essential in building a safety culture, driving the reliability of care delivery, and achieving the ultimate goal of zero harm. By creating a system of safety instead of relying on isolated interventions, safety leaders can ensure the safety and transparency of reporting safety events.
Getting Nurses on Board with Serving on Boards
Resource → Blog • Added on Sep 20, 2017
With their deep knowledge of clinical problems, best practices, quality indicators and other issues related to the safety, quality and experience of care, nurse leaders are well suited to serve on health care governing boards.
Engaging the Millennial Workforce in Patient Safety: 10 Action Items
Resource → Blog • Added on Jul 11, 2017
Building and sustaining a safety culture is a top priority of health care systems nationwide, and the youngest members of today’s health care workforce—the millennial generation—may be just the partners they need to accomplish this. Following these 10 action items can help organizations harness the power of this generation of young adults.
Psychological Safety Characterizes High-Performing Teams
Resource → Blog • Added on Jun 5, 2017
Many efforts to improve safety are built on the principles of High Reliability and Lean methodology, with the aim of reducing variation and creating an environment in which errors and accidents are less likely to occur. To be successful, these efforts must be supported by a solid foundation through which caregivers have clear expectations for how processes are to be carried out, sufficient training to develop the necessary skill set, an understanding of how they will be held accountable, and strategies to use when they notice an oversight or mistake that could lead to a larger problem.
2017 National Nurses Week: Caring for Our Caregivers
Resource → Blog • Added on May 9, 2017
More than a discrete care attribute, compassionate connected care describes the totality of a care experience. As the primary front-line caregivers, nurses are largely responsible for making sure patients' needs for this type of care are met consistently.
Nurturing the Call to Serve in Every Member of the Health Care Workforce
Resource → Blog • Added on Apr 6, 2017
We often hear doctors and nurses explain that their primary motivation for pursuing a health care profession is to serve their fellow human beings. Other individuals in the health care workforce—including direct and contract employees who provide a supporting role to front-line care providers—are no less passionate or committed to serving patients. They share the calling to excel and provide the kind of compassionate care that patients expect and deserve.
Making Connections: Nurturing the Engagement-Experience Link
Resource → Blog • Added on Mar 30, 2017
Caregiver engagement is a powerful driver of the patient experience, but engagement and patient experience improvement efforts must work in concert to be optimally effective. Ensuring that engagement is properly connected to the patient experience requires understanding the possible areas of misalignment and providing the resources and support needed to address them.
Patient Safety 24/7/365
Resource → Blog • Added on Mar 16, 2017
This week, March 12 to 18, is Patient Safety Awareness Week, an annual education and awareness campaign for health care safety led by the National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF).
Let's Talk About Pain
Resource → Blog • Added on Mar 6, 2017
As the media continue to focus on the very real opioid epidemic, we as care providers must stay ever mindful of the fact that our patients’ pain is also very real, and that we cannot subjugate one to fix the other. It is our job to better understand and help manage our patients’ pain.
A Model Patient Experience
Resource → Blog • Added on Jan 24, 2017
Caregivers provide surprisingly exceptional care to a surgeon's family member during a late-night visit to the emergency department.
New Nursing Research Brings Motivational Theory to Life
Resource → Blog • Added on Dec 7, 2016
New research demonstrating the importance of nurse workplace safety on nurse, patient and payment outcomes aligns well with Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs motivational theory and the concept of compassionate, connected care for caregivers..
A Video Tribute to Nurses' Fighting Spirit
Resource → Blog • Added on May 12, 2016
Registered nurse Rebecca Bogan at Children's Hospital and Clinics of Minnesota created an inspirational video celebrating the fighting spirit of all of the caregivers on her team and the children they care for.
Health Care Safety Culture: The Role of Nurses
Resource → Blog • Added on May 11, 2016
Press Ganey Chief Nursing Officer Christina Dempsey offers her perspective on the vital role that nurse leaders and front-line nurses play in developing and sustaining a culture of safety in health care.
Small Patients Need Big Safety and Reliability Goals
Resource → Blog • Added on Apr 11, 2016
The challenges, problems and concerns that influence the safety of pediatric care are different from those that contribute to harm in the adult care setting. Therefore, solutions and interventions must address and reflect these differences in order to protect children from serious, preventable harm.
The Word on ED Wait Times
Resource → Blog • Added on Oct 19, 2015
It's no surprise that the longer patients wait, the less likely they are to recommend the facility. What is surprising, however, is what researchers found when they peeled back the layers of this relationship.
A Risky Gamble
Resource → Blog • Added on Oct 1, 2015
As online reporting of patient experience data gains momentum, some health systems may unintentionally be gambling with their brand by adopting reporting methodologies that undermine the ethics of transparency.
What's Humility Got to Do with It?
Resource → Blog • Added on Sep 25, 2015
The lexicon of health care is changing. Where health systems used to talk about maximizing volume, they now talk about optimizing value. Decisions that were once made primarily by physicians are now made by teams, and physician-centered cultures have been replaced with those centered around patients.
Why We Should be Listening to Joy Behar
Resource → Blog • Added on Sep 18, 2015
By Elizabeth McConville, RN, BSN, CPHQ, Press Ganey. Joy Behar and Michelle Collins may have accidently opened the nurse can of worms on The View this week by—ironically enough—mocking Colorado nurse Kelley Johnson’s use of a public platform to improve understanding of the profession.
Not All Stars are Created Equal
Resource → Blog • Added on Sep 1, 2015
At its core, transparency of patient experience data empowers consumers to make informed decisions about where to seek care and from whom. It also raises provider awareness of performance gaps, informs improvement strategies and promotes physician accountability.
Who Owns Transparency?
Resource → Blog • Added on Jul 20, 2015
In this era of rising health care consumerism, transparency is often approached as a marketing initiative designed to satisfy patients’ increasing desire to curate their own health care experience and to manage an organization’s online reputation.
The Time is Now for Child HCAHPS
Resource → Blog • Added on Jul 16, 2015
By Diana Mahoney, Editorial Manager
Wednesday, November 12 2014
“We can do better,” Dr. Mark Schuster told attendees of a pediatric roundtable session at the 2014 Press Ganey National Client Conference in Orlando, Florida last week.