Ever since the U.S. government decided to link Medicare reimbursement dollars to patient satisfaction scores, hospital administrators have been obsessed with improving the quality of care for patients visiting their emergency departments. While the motivation may be partly financial, the goal of improving the patient experience during emergency department and hospital visits is an admirable one.
Unfortunately, many of the tactics used by administrators have done little to achieve that goal. Hiring national “experts” on customer service to give lectures to the hospital staff, or introducing catchy mnemonics like AIDET (which stands for Acknowledge, Introduce, Duration, Explanation, and Thank You) to guide physicians in conducting more compassionate patient interviews, have been equally ineffective in markedly improving patient satisfaction.
If we aim to better the patient experience in the emergency department (and the rest of the hospital), we need to shift our focus from the patients to the nursing staff. After all, the people who spend the most time with patients are not the physicians but the nurses. If nurses are dissatisfied at work, patients will inevitably be dissatisfied with their experience.
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