Chapter 3
The Patient Experience The battle line in the quest for excellence in healthcare goes through the patients’ experience. The patient experience is no longer an afterthought but the very essence of healthcare organizations’ existence. Excellence in patients’ experience is inextricably linked to excellence in employee experience, and patient experience suffers when staff morale is low. Of the many factors responsible for low staff morale, the most compelling have to do with management’s failure to strike the right balance between the workload demand and the organization’s capacity. When the staff is visibly overwhelmed, it is unrealistic to expect them to care much about the patient experience. Without careful monitoring of the available resources and staff’s capacity (in terms of time, equipment, processes, competencies, and skills), the patient experience will remain a distant concern for employees. There will always be employees who give of themselves regardless of the morale in the unit or department. However, they are the exception. Unless there is a wholesale retooling of the employee experience, employees that are unengaged can only produce sporadic evidence of successes. Patient experience survey results are up for two months, then down for three, then up for one, etc. These organizations are perpetually in pursuit of the elusive top box score, and the employees are forever confounded by their lack of sustainable progress. Many of these survey “warriors” are unwilling cast members in a theatre of anguish fueled by a recalcitrant organizational culture. The Beryl Institute defines the patient experience as the sum of all interactions shaped by an organization’s culture that influence patient 51
