Patient experience refers to the sum of all interactions that play a significant role in influencing patients’ perceptions across the continuum of care. A healthcare organization’s culture is the chief facilitator of a patient experience. It is cardinal that you put the patient and their experience at the heart of any quality improvement that you make.
Below are the top 5 patient experience mistakes that you should avoid:
- Ineffective Communication
Proper and effective communication in health care organizations helps build a good rapport between medics and patients. Difference between successful and unsuccessful outcomes of health care services is chiefly determined by informing, instilling confidence, and convincing patients on the need for treatments or follow-ups. You should speak in a clear and friendly manner and avoid using medical jargon that often confuses patients. Whenever you use written information, always use short words, sentences, and explain technical terms.
- Improper counseling
Counseling helps patients discover solutions to their problems; it explores and clarifies various ways that help such patients increase their well being. Nevertheless, many medics misunderstand this concept; they take advantage of counseling to inform patients of their disease as well as direct them towards a course of action.
Counseling should focus on patients’ needs (as perceived by the patients); it should not focus on what others consider these needs to be. You should listen to your patients and work with them towards finding the best ways to understand and resolve their problems.
- Bridge of confidence/or privacy
Health care providers should ensure confidentiality of their patients’ information and store their records securely. Disclosure of a patient’s medical information without his or her permission is unethical.
Again, it is essential that you ensure privacy of personal needs and hygiene for all patients. Your organization should have separate facilities for women and men. You should ensure that accommodation for children is in a child-friendly environment.
Patients in isolation, may be due to their infectious conditions, should not be neglected or stigmatized. You should help them increase their self-worth by creating time to interact with them outside of actual treatment procedures.
- Unclean and unsafe environment
All patients have the right to be attended to in a clean and safe environment. You should incorporate a housekeeping team in your organization to ensure appropriate use of equipment, reuse of materials, and for infection control.
- Inadequate use of automation and self-service
Most patients feel offended whenever their time is wasted. Even though human beings are vital in the dissemination of heath care services, automation and self-service do best on some of these services. You should not deny your patients the chance to fill out patient-related forms. Patients fill such forms in a quicker manner as compared to doctors since their personal information is already at their finger-tips.
In any case, nowadays patients have immense experience with efficient mobile and online-based models; thus, they quickly become impatient with duplicate and inefficiency procedures and processes.
Conclusion
Proper patient experience plays a key role in improving the outcomes of health care services. Health care organizations should ensure effective communication, clean and safe environment, confidentiality of patients, and automation of services to help ensure effective patient experience.