Poster Presentation
Water's Edge Ballroom (Hilton Waikoloa Village)
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
9:30 AM - 10:00 AM
Water's Edge Ballroom (Hilton Waikoloa Village)
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
2:30 PM - 3:00 PM
Patient Perceptions of Nursing Care in the Coronary Care Unit (CCU)
Mary Caldwell, MPA, BSN, RN, Sandra Clark, BSN, RN, Cheryl Behner Patterson, RN, Lisa A. Ulrich, BSN, RN, and Leslie E. Parker, RN, CCRN. Coronary Care Unit, Kettering Medical Center, Kettering, OH, USA
| Learning Objective #1: Describe three important patient perceptions of customer satisfaction |
| Learning Objective #2: List and describe the three main concepts generated by the patients and families that were listed on the qualitative portion of the survey |
The purpose of this project was to gain a picture from the patients in the Coronary Care Unit (CCU) on their perceptions about how well the nurses took care of them. It is common knowledge that the personnel that have the most contact with the customers have the greatest impact on the success of the business. Nurses are the key to any hospital's customer service program. Since the CCU actually discharges few patients, they did not get much feedback from the institutional survey reports except for written comments that patients may put in their feed-back form. They had a vision to develop a plan to obtain feedback from patients on how they were doing in taking care of them while they were in the CCU. They developed the research question: “Adequate data collection, appropriate feedback and regular staff inservices will make a positive difference in the results of CCU's customer satisfaction survey.” Staff nurses formed a working group and developed a tool. They selected patients or families, gave them the survey tool, and directed them to complete it before they left the unit. After two weeks of distributing surveys, the nurses tallied the results from the initial survey. During the third week of the project, nurses conducted informative briefings with the staff to inform them of what they found and gave tips on how they should improve. Then they conducted another survey with the same tool with a similar group of patients. They discovered that by comparing the results of “before” and “after,” there were generally positive outcomes. The results correlate with Mason's (1998) findings: when nurses understand the patient's wants and needs, customer satisfaction increases. The staff nurses completed four segments of the survey, one a quarter, and has continued into 2004.