Safety, High Reliability, and Equity Are Intertwined
Resource → Blog • Added on Jun 25, 2020
The domain of equity has been brought to the forefront by the terrible confluence of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has disproportionately affected the health and financial stability of certain groups, and the video footage of tragedies that highlight the inequities black and other diverse communities face every day. In this blog, Tejal Gandhi, Chief Safety and Transformation Officer, evaluates ways to help health care organizations close the equity gap and commit to equity as a safety and quality imperative.
Cultural Realignment After COVID-19: Signs Your Organization Needs Help
Resource → Blog • Added on May 27, 2020
Although the day-to-day impact of COVID-19 varies by organization, the crisis has universally highlighted strengths and weaknesses around such cultural considerations as communication practices, support for caregivers’ well-being, process reliability, and system resilience. In this post, Martin Wright, Partner, Strategic Consulting, identifies signs that indicate when an organization's culture needs to change and outlines leadership strategies to address them.
Four Essentials of Effective Telemedicine
Resource → Blog • Added on May 4, 2020
The thought leader series continues as our Chief Experience Officer, Chrissy Daniels, shares how simple shifts in communication styles can help make telehealth experiences as effective as in-office visits. As health care organizations ramp up their telehealth offerings in response to COVID-19, this blog will guide them in four essentials of effective telemedicine: authenticity, agenda setting, empathy, and closing checklist.
COVID-19 Caregiver Collaborative: Practical Insights and Notes from the Field
Resource → Blog • Added on Apr 22, 2020
This blog features approximately 50 physicians, nurses, and administrative leaders from health care systems on the front lines of the COVID-19 crisis to participate in a virtual Caregiver Collaborative to discuss and share practical experiences and tools for supporting caregivers and staff emotionally, physically, professionally, and socially while caring for patients during the pandemic. As these leaders continue identify alternative routes to safe, patient-centered care delivery during these difficult times, we will update these notes and make executive summaries of each session available on Press Ganey’s COVID-19 resources page.
Keeping Families and Patients Connected During the COVID-19 Crisis
Resource → Blog • Added on Apr 13, 2020
The ongoing spread of COVID-19 has warranted extreme social separation measures and infection prevention protocols that are making it difficult for families and patients to stay connected. In this blog, our thought leader series continues as Rachel Biblow, Senior Vice President and Partner, Strategic Consulting teams up with Benjamin Cooperman, Senior Associate, Strategic Consulting to discuss ways that health care organizations can help their clinicians both connect COVID-19 patients with their loved ones and stay connected to their own families during these trying times.
Caregiver Redeployment During COVID-19: Keeping Staff Safe
Resource → Blog • Added on Apr 10, 2020
To manage the anticipated surge of coronavirus cases, hospitals are redirecting physicians, nurses, and other care providers to perform tasks that are typically outside their domain. In the latest of our thought leader blog series, Tejal Gandhi, Chief Safety and Transformation Officer, shares strategies, rooted in high reliability principles, to mitigate risk and allow staff to feel comfortable, competent, and safe in their new roles.
COVID-19 Caregiver Collaborative: Surge Timing Determines Caregiver Needs
Resource → Blog • Added on Apr 9, 2020
As the intensity of the COVID-19 pandemic increases, timing has become a differentiator between those organizations in the surge and those who are anticipating it. In this installment of our thought leader blog series, Chief Medical Officer and host of our COVID-19 Caregiver Collaborative, Jessica Dudley, highlights four themes that emerged in the latest meeting: the importance of collaboration and centralized policies, the shift from planning to proactive deployment, leadership succession planning and communication, and psychological support.
Caregiver Collaborative: Supporting Clinician Well-Being During COVID-19
Resource → Blog • Added on Apr 2, 2020
The clinical team at Press Ganey convened a COVID-19 Caregiver Collaborative to discuss the unique challenges physicians, nurses, and other patient care professionals face on the front lines of care during this pandemic and to share strategies and tactics for addressing them. In the latest of the series, Chief Clinical Officer Jessica Dudley describes how these leaders bring a new level of collaboration, candidness, consistency, and creativity to the fight against COVID-19.
Transparency is a Rising Tide in the COVID-19 Battle
Resource → Blog • Added on Mar 31, 2020
Tejal Gandhi, Chief Safety and Transformation Officer, returns to the COVID-19 thought leader series to discuss the importance of breaking down barriers to full transparency to promote the collective good during the coronavirus pandemic. Not only is full transparency foundational to patient safety, but this willingness to share vulnerability and work together is reassuring and reaffirms all that is good about health care and humanity.
Webinar Series Provides Guidance for Managing Operational Challenges
Resource → Blog • Added on Mar 26, 2020
With health systems under the stress of the coronavirus outbreak, high reliability principles are more important than ever to ensure the delivery of holistically excellent care. In this post, Strategic Consulting Partner Adam Higman introduces an on-demand webinar series designed to help organizations manage operational challenges posed by the COVID-19 crisis. The first three webinars in the series address the most pressing operational questions that organizations are facing right now: effective communications, staffing strategies, and capacity building.
Trust in the Time of Coronavirus
Resource → Blog • Added on Mar 25, 2020
According to Chief Experience Officer Chrissy Daniels, trust is what allows us to move forward with agility. In the fourth installment of the thought leader series, Daniels offers universal communication skills for relationships, reliability, and leadership to build confidence in COVID-19 health care teams who must come together quickly and effectively to deliver challenging care to highly stressed patients.
Remember the Caregivers: Be in the Arena
Resource → Blog • Added on Mar 23, 2020
In part III of the series, Chief Clinical Officer Jessica Dudley discusses how nonessential staff can "be in the arena" with caregivers as they fight COVID-19 on the front lines. This means doing everything from following social distancing recommendations to expressly thanking health care workers for their commitment to patients during this difficult time.
Caring for Caregivers: A Leadership Checklist
Resource → Blog • Added on Mar 20, 2020
Ensuring the physical and emotional well-being of the health care workforce must be a leadership priority during this time of COVID-19 crisis. In the second installment of our thought leader series, Chief Safety and Transformation Officer Tejal Gandhi outlines strategies for protecting caregivers against physical and emotional harm as they bear the burden of the pandemic and deliver the best care to patients.
Recognizing the Commitment of Nurses
Resource → Blog • Added on Mar 18, 2020
As the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread fear and uncertainty throughout the world, leaving many quarantined and out of work, nurses are doing what they've always done: providing care to patients and families with compassion, empathy, and expertise. This blog series will bring together the voices of Press Ganey thought leaders to address the drastic shifts in health care and outline ways to support caregivers during this trying time. In the first installment of the series, Chief Nursing Officer Christina Dempsey highlights the critical importance of clear communication among caregivers and commitment to evidence-based practices in adapting to new health care norms.
The State of Workforce Engagement: Leveraging Interdependencies for Improvement
Resource → Blog • Added on Mar 18, 2020
Findings from the white paper report show that workforce engagement is connected to multiple improvement outcomes, impacting the safety, quality, and experience of care. When driving organizational change, health systems can use these interdependencies to their advantage. This fourth post in the ongoing state of engagement blog series explores strategies for leveraging the relationship between workforce engagement and patient experience for sustained improvement, year after year.
The State of Workforce Engagement: Helping Physicians Find Balance
Resource → Blog • Added on Jan 30, 2020
According to new research reported in the state of workforce engagement white paper, physicians are the least engaged, least resilient segment of the health care workforce. A deeper dive into the data shows that although physicians in private practice have slightly better engagement than peers who are employed by large health care organizations, they demonstrate slightly lower resilience, which for all physicians appears to be driven by the trouble they have disconnecting from their work. This post, the third installment in an ongoing series exploring the research findings in more detail, considers the implications of these phenomena and suggests ways to start addressing physicians’ burgeoning needs.
The State of Workforce Engagement: Meeting the Needs of Bedside Caregivers
Resource → Blog • Added on Dec 12, 2019
Health care professionals whose jobs involve direct patient care are less engaged in their work than those not on the front lines of care, according to the findings of a recent white paper on the state of workforce engagement in health care. As Part II of our blog series designed to deconstruct some of the key findings of the report, this post focuses on how understanding barriers to direct patient care is crucial in defining best practices for bedside caregivers. Part I in the series looked at generational differences in engagement and offered recommendations for bridging generation gaps.
Fighting Fake News and Building Trust on the Web
Resource → Blog • Added on Dec 10, 2019
Trust is something in short supply in most aspects of life these days, particularly in today's "fake news" social media climate. As health care consumers look more and more to online reviews and ratings when seeking care, the Internet has become a platform where trust between consumers and health care providers has the potential to be built or destroyed. Lessons learned from other business sectors can help organizations in their mission to deserve trust by nurturing a highly reliable culture with a holistic perspective on excellence.
The State of Workforce Engagement: Tapping into Generational Expectations
Resource → Blog • Added on Nov 7, 2019
As reported in a new white paper on the state of workforce engagement in health care, Press Ganey researchers analyzed responses from more than 1.8 million physicians, nurses, and other health care employees surveyed in 2018 and identified wide variation in engagement by profession, demographics, geography, and other variables. This blog series will deconstruct the findings to tease out those that are likely to have the greatest impact on organizational outcomes and will offer recommendations for driving and sustaining improvement. The focus of this month’s post is generational differences in engagement.
Medical Practice Roundtable: UUH Helps Providers Meet Patient, Physician Needs
Resource → Blog • Added on Oct 30, 2019
In the first of an ongoing series of interviews focusing on ways high-performing medical practices are meeting some of today’s most pressing care delivery challenges, Mari Ransco, Director of Patient Experience at University of Utah Health, discusses how that organization is helping its provider groups create work environments that address both patient and physician needs.
Let’s “Give It Up” for Nurses through Compassionate, Connected Care
Resource → Blog • Added on Oct 28, 2019
A Facebook post featuring an exhausted nurse who routinely puts her patients before herself sparked an outpouring of comments and an instinctive need to acknowledge nurses' capacity for caring, but also their need to be cared for. In her book, The Antidote to Suffering: How Compassionate Connected Care Can Improve Safety, Quality, and Experience, Press Ganey Chief Nursing Officer Christy Dempsey stresses that it is incumbent upon health care leaders to nurture organizational cultures that support caring for caregivers as well as patients.
Meeting the Real and Virtual Needs of Today's Health Care Consumer
Resource → Blog • Added on Oct 16, 2019
This blog describes how telemedicine will not change what patients want from their providers, but it will force health systems to rethink their organizational structures to best meet the changing expectations of those they serve. As telemedicine becomes more prevalent, health care providers must keep their eyes on what matters to patients, striving to adapt and respond to the needs of patients as consumers. Inspired by Chrissy Daniels' roundtable at the 2019 PX Summit.
Measuring Consumer Loyalty: Why the Net Promoter Score Is Not Enough
Resource → Blog • Added on Sep 24, 2019
On its own, the Net Promoter Score as a measure of consumer loyalty doesn't provide the insights needed to drive improvement. Recommendation intent is one piece of a much larger puzzle that requires deep data and advanced analytics to understand what consumers want and need and how to keep them coming back.
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.