Creating and Sustaining a Lasting Culture for the Patient and Family Experience
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Dorothy Foglia, PhD, RN, NEA-BC – NTONL President – Texas Health Frisco CNO
Adriane Vasquez, MPT, MBA, PT – Texas Health Frisco – Director of Rehabilitation and Cardiopulmonary
“People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.”
– Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou’s powerful words are even more important in today’s ever-changing and often chaotic healthcare environment. Her words hold a sincere message that care (regardless of this chaos and change) must be patient focused with unyielding compassion and emotion. In evolving environments, a supportive culture is the driving force behind incomparable care. Every patient and patient family member is looking for care that is seamless and trustworthy; care that is centered around consistency and creative individualized approaches that meet their needs and expectations. This creates a special and unexpected moment that everyone deserves as we provide courageous, convicted, and consumer-focused care to all hospital guests that include patients, families, visitors, vendors, physicians, and even staff. To achieve a lasting culture centered around all guests, every element of care must be personalized and authentic.
The core goal of a consumer-focused approach is anticipating each guest’s needs with a pleasant surprise – a “magic moment.” You are exceeding their expectations and addressing their needs in unexpected ways. This is about an expression of your authentic interest in your guest as a person and not just a transaction, making enduring personal and emotional connections with empathy, generosity, compassion, and gratitude. It is about truth, the meaning, and the details that are not measured by performance indicators. In our own organization, a former fire chief was a long-term patient. Our clinical team (including the providers) noticed a decline in his spirits and began looking for ways to engage his friends during the pandemic when no visitors were permitted. We knew he had been craving his favorite food from a local restaurant, and instead of delivering a meal from his friends, our staff coordinated with the local fire departments to arrange a surprise. Within 24 hours we had six fire stations and 75 first responders set up in our hospital parking lot. Twenty first responders were lifted by their trucks to the floor where our patient was located, so that as our patient appeared at his window, they could see him, and he could see them. What they witnessed was a huge smile as his long-favored meal was delivered. This experience is one that will never be forgotten by our patient and his family, his colleagues in the field, and just as important all of us at the hospital.
Seamless service means providing everything the guest needs, well beyond the minimum standards. If several steps are needed to care for their concerns, it is important to keep them in the loop with updates by email or with a quick phone call to provide progress. Customers (patients) feel heard and remembered as reassurance and communication are powerful customer service tools. This goal also results in trust between patient, family, and hospital caregivers.
Customer service training began before we opened the doors of our new hospital with facilitated leadership retreats and process mapping. These learnings were reinforced through new employee orientation and the culture sustained through leaders and front-line staff who are active members of our patient/family experience committee.
In addition, with a focus on the guests’ needs and seamless care, the establishment of a CREDO to create the understanding and expectations of each employee’s role in creating this experience is key. An expectation for all employees is professional communication in every interaction while engaging with guests in all areas of their hospital stay, including their safe passage to home. All employees must be able to provide a warm welcome, an out of this world experience, and a “what could we do better approach” 100% of the time. The confirmation of a successful culture is when front-line staff feel empowered to create unique experiences for all guests we serve. Within this front-line empowerment, there are many resources made available so that the guest experience is immediately transitioned and geared toward an “out of this world experience.” For example, in our organization we provide all units with a toolkit that includes everyday items: gift cards for special meals and/or clothes, toiletry items, technology accessories, games, and so forth. Guests appreciate all this and more, and even more relevant is the fact that our staff can offer comforts without hesitation.
Creating an exceptional “out of this world” experience means we have employees who not only take great care of our guests, but they also take great care of each other. It is easy to live the values when everything is going well, but even more difficult when we are challenged by time, stress, or even a global pandemic. That is the real test to any culture. Remembering that no matter what the circumstances are, we need to conduct ourselves in a manner that demonstrates our values and shows others that we care, while being reflective in our daily interactions with everyone who surrounds us. We must take the time to help each other by doing all things with integrity, compassion, and respect. This is how we build and maintain a culture that people are excited to participate in and share. While these challenges can sometimes seem insurmountable, Dr. King’s words from 1964 explain clearly: “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands in times of challenge and controversy.”
Another key to creating an “out of this world” experience is having a proactive approach to service. Proactive service means taking the lead, which will reassure your guests of your competency and commitment to their needs. Guests appreciate initiative as you, acknowledge their concerns, offer a solution, and are dedicated to following through. With our “what could we do better approach,” (a proactive versus reactive approach to service), we ensure our guests that we have the truest of intentions on finding a resolution. The next step would be actively seeking and accepting the feedback shared on an experience to create process improvement opportunities.
Now that we have talked about the keys to building a strong culture, we need to discuss tools that facilitate a pulse check of the culture you are creating. These tools will include Lean Daily Management (LDM), which is a methodology of leaders continually engaging with frontline staff and leaders on a daily basis to improve operations and efficiency in real time. We demonstrate a relentless pursuit of perfection in terms of clinical outcomes through implementation of high reliability tools and reliable care blueprint pathways. We commit to providing “out of this world” experiences for the guests that we serve by taking a personal ownership of their care and acting to improve their experiences in every interaction.
Lean Daily Management (LDM) program based on the core principles of lean production (the systematic method for the elimination of waste) and Six Sigma™ (the process improvement technique designed to reduce mistakes or defects in process) are daily activities that will allow front-line employees to continue to have a voice, provide knowledge on key focus specifics, and create process improvement opportunities that will be imbedded in the cultural foundation.
These diverse elements of customer experience and patient care will lay the foundation for a culture that promotes outstanding clinical outcomes and exceptional guest experiences. We are all responsible for implementing and reinforcing the tools and behaviors that promote the key elements of our culture. This grassroots approach will result in exceptional care based on an empowered front-line staff that are willing to do whatever it takes to sustain a culture that places our guests at the center of all that we do.
Even during challenging and stressful times (such as during a pandemic), a culture of respect and dignity is critical in keeping guests the focus. As Grant Williams said: “The ultimate judge of a person’s character is their ability to exceed expectations when little recognition or praise is given.” An effective culture is possible to develop, implement, and sustain that leads to improved customer service in any healthcare organization. Please join us at the Annual TONL Leadership Conference this spring, where we will detail these actions in a poster presentation.
Notes:
References available upon request. Please contact:
adrianevasquez@texashealth.org
Special thanks to Brett Lee (Texas Health Frisco President) and Shona Huffman (Texas Health Frisco Director of Communications) for their expertise and leadership in assistance writing this article.
