Congress Abstracts 2003

88

GETTING MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE PROBLEM: AN IMPORTANT COMPONENT FOR IMPROVEMENT OF PATIENT SATISFACTION. Valsamma A. Varghese, RN, Marlene Z. Cohen, RN, PhD, JoAnn Mick, RN, MSN, MBA, AOCN^®, Rosanne Arlington, RN, MSN, CNS, ONC, and Sherry Preston, RN, BS, CPHQ, University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX.

Patient satisfaction is important to the patient, the patient’s family, the healthcare workers, and the hospital. It is an important overall indicator of patients’ perception of the care they receive while hospitalized. It was noted that the mean satisfaction scores regarding nurse response time was 80. The initial purpose of conducting a call light study was to identify the number of call lights occurring and our nursing staff response time. Data were also collected to determine the pattern of the type of requests patients were making when they used the call light system. The goal was to use the data to increase our understanding of the issues leading to patient dissatisfaction with the response time of nursing personnel. To identify specific issues related to patient calls, a log was maintained to identify the number of patient calls, the purpose of the call, and the length of time before the call was answered by a team member. We discovered that of the 250 calls recorded, 80% of the calls were answered within 3 minutes. We also determined that 25% (the highest single percentage) of the calls were requests for pain medication. We were then able to look at factors that more closely affected our management of the patient’s pain to proactively develop and implement a program focusing on pain management to eliminate the necessity for a patient to use the call light to request pain medication. As a result of implementation of our team’s strategies, our overall mean patient satisfaction scores increased to 84 and there has been a narrowing of the variability of these scores. The satisfaction of patients regarding nurse response time increased. Many social forces, such as consumerism, customer satisfaction, JCAHO standards, and monetary constraints contribute to the increasing demand that oncology nurses provide cost-effective, high-quality clinical services. Through this process of data collection and analysis, we were able to design and implement specific strategies to improve pain management and patient satisfaction.