To Improve the Inpatient Experience, Invest in the Human Side of Health Care.

Abstract

Hospitals increasingly allocate substantial resources to improve the inpatient care experience: chief experience officers, overhauled food menus, parking discounts, and Disney customer service training for staff are just a sampling of the various investments hospitals have made in recent years to increase satisfaction and experience scores.1,2 Attention to the patient experience is important not just as a competitive business strategy but as an ethical practice; children and their parents expect to receive appropriate, respectful, and timely care; they expect to be treated in a safe and clean environment; and in the vast majority of instances, they expect to leave the hospital in better health than when they arrived. However, identification of specific modifiable mechanisms influencing formal parent and child ratings of the pediatric inpatient experience has lagged until now. In an analysis of 17 727 parent-submitted Child Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems surveys on care in 69 hospitals across 34 states, Feng et al3 found that of 10 items, 2 were consistently and strongly associated … Address correspondence to Heather L. Tubbs-Cooley, PhD, RN, FAAN, College of Nursing, The Ohio State University, 1585 Neil Ave, Columbus OH 43210. E-mail: tubbscooley.1{at}osu.edu