4 Ways To Improve Patient Satisfaction

Have you ever experienced being in a hospital and not getting the service that you expected to receive? How do you feel about that particular experience? Does it frustrate you and affect your perception of the hospital’s service? While perception about patient satisfaction may differ depending on the patient’s and doctor’s perspectives, there’s no going around the fact that it plays a pivotal role in relieving the patients’ burden.

While providing satisfactory patient services may be a daunting task to accomplish for many healthcare professionals and physicians, it’s still in their sworn duty not just to treat illnesses but also to administer quality healthcare services. To effectively improve patient satisfaction, physicians should be knowledgeable about the needs of their patients and the ways to provide for them.

Fortunately, there are now various service providers that offer courses where they can earn an MBA in Healthcare Administration.

To help you more, below are some helpful tips you can utilize to improve patient satisfaction:

1. Boost Communication with Patients

In every type of profession, having clear communication with your colleagues and clients is always the key to enhancing the quality of your work. This continues to prove to be highly applicable in providing quality healthcare for medical patients. Aside from use of modern medical equipment and advanced medical devices, one of the things that can help boost patient experience is through having constant communication with them.

Rapport building, in particular, continues to prove to be beneficial in establishing a doctor-patient relationship, improving patient satisfaction and uplifting patient morale. When it comes to enhancing patient experience, you should make your patients feel like they have someone to turn to, especially if they’re dealing with postoperative pain.

For instance, patients dealing with chronic diseases are more likely to experience anxiety, panic attacks, and depression. Hence, they’ll need not just quality healthcare but also genuine patient care to get through their condition. To effectively bolster patient experience among them, you must be able to build effective communication with them.

improve patient satisfaction

2. Administer Unconditional Positive Regard

Have you ever experienced asking for a medical service and not getting the polite response that you expected? While many people may let these situations pass, a simple gesture of impoliteness might create a bad impression on the entire hospital. Every patient deserves quality healthcare, regardless of their race, gender, and social status.

That being said, healthcare providers and physicians must provide equal treatment for their patients and treat them with utmost respect. Particularly, doctors and nurses should administer outright attentiveness to their patients and show amicable behavior towards them.

3. Demonstrate Professionalism

One of the most common things that can effectively improve patient satisfaction includes professionalism and quality work from physicians and healthcare providers. There’s no going around the fact that physicians occasionally experienced unmannerly behavior from their patients and the people with whom they worked.

Aside from that, there are also times that these people have to work despite dealing with personal problems. However, their chosen profession doesn’t permit such situations to affect the quality of services they provide for their patients.

Even so, the ability to demonstrate exemplary professionalism in the workplace and show accountability in their work is one of the many things that help nurses boost patient satisfaction.

4. Promote Patient-Centered Care

Improving patient experience heavily relies on advancing impeccable patient care. Apart from using modern medical devices, healthcare providers should also be able to promote patient care by providing them with quality healthcare services that each patient deserves.

Particularly, promoting efficient steps such as having one-on-one treatment sessions between nurses and patients, providing a safe and comfortable environment for them, and actively participating in designated treatments must be encouraged within patients to effectively acquire medical help and improve the patient experience.

Patient Satisfaction—The Key to Patient Recovery

After learning of the helpful ways to effectively boost patient satisfaction, it’s also important to understand the role that it plays in the healthcare industry. Interestingly, many people believed the common notion about patient satisfaction that it may help patients recover faster. In light of that, here’s why patient satisfaction is important in the healthcare industry:

• Improving patient satisfaction has been one of the fast-rising topics in the healthcare industry in recent years. Researchers assert that there’s a direct link between patient experience, reimbursements, patient retention, and clinical outcomes.

• Consequently, many healthcare organizations are working ceaselessly to discover new methods of healthcare services that can effectively boost patient experience scores.

• One study shows that high patient satisfaction plays a significant role in promoting patient recovery.

• Aside from that, having a high patient satisfaction and Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems scores proved to be beneficial for many healthcare organizations, including having higher reimbursement payments, positive patient experience, and better patient retention rates.

Conclusion

Being a part of the healthcare industry is both a challenging and exhilarating task that one can experience in one’s professional journey. This particular profession requires expertise and effort from healthcare providers and physicians as they’re in charge of attending to their patients’ medical needs.

Aside from providing advanced medical care, healthcare providers also need to ensure that their patients are satisfied with their care.

To effectively do that, some of the things that healthcare professionals can do include furthering their education to earn certifications in patient care, boosting communication with patients, administering respect, demonstrating professionalism, and promoting patient-centered care. Through these alternatives, healthcare providers can efficiently improve patient satisfaction and enhance the patient experience.