Client satisfaction is a high priority for all organizations, regardless of the service or product they offer; after all, their success depends entirely on their customers. The same holds true for nursing, where patient satisfaction is key to organizational success.
Here service providers give patient care quality great importance, and nurses play a lead role in ensuring adequate patient care. Nurses on the front lines have the most frequent one-on-one interaction with their patients, more so than doctors. Therefore, their skill, qualities, and interpersonal abilities significantly impact patient care.
As nurses, you must have theoretical and practical clinical knowledge and interpersonal skills to provide the best quality care. Patients are heavily dependent on their service providers to need to feel safe, understood and cared for in the anxiety-provoking hospital set-up.
For effective nursing and the best patient care, you should adopt the following strategies:
Polish your clinical expertise
In an industry as rapidly advancing as healthcare, learning never ends; there is always room for improvement and acquiring new knowledge. If you aim to be a lifelong learner, you can improve patient care by ensuring they receive the best quality service possible.
While you can enter the nursing field with a degree, strive to learn more and more during your job. You must be on top of the latest developments in the field. In addition to higher education degree courses, many nursing courses, training opportunities, and online nurse educator resources can help equip you with new skills and knowledge.
Especially during the pandemic, many new online resources have been developed that can be availed from the comfort of your home.
Exhibit empathy
Imagine being brought to a hospital with severe physical injuries and facing a cold healthcare team, too rigid and unsympathetic. Patients are at their most vulnerable position inside a healthcare facility, and the healthcare providers play a vital role in making them feel at ease.
Stress, anxiety, sadness, and fear are all common responses from patients, but if you prove to them that they are in safe hands, it can make their experience a whole lot better. Nurses should be empathetic, giving their clients a listening ear, stepping into their shoes, and not undermining their emotions.
Fostering such trust in them will help in the future when you intend to get important information from them or to convince them to undergo a specific treatment intervention they might not initially agree with.
Make patient care individual centered
A patient-centered approach to healthcare service provision includes empowering patients to have a say in their treatment process and be actively involved in every decision that concerns them. This approach was developed based on the idea that better outcomes are expected when patient views are considered.
Research has proven a strong correlation between patient satisfaction and treatment outcomes, thus suggesting that patient-centeredness can only reap positive results.
Ensure your client interaction is as patient-centered as possible, considering your organization’s policies. Treat your patients individually and avoid calling them by their room numbers alone. Get to know them, their back story, and their viewpoints.
A few crucial values for patient-centered care entail the need to give them respect while educating and empowering them in the decision-making process while providing emotional support where needed.
Patients actively involved in the treatment processes are more likely to respond to treatment and be satisfied with the outcomes.
Adopt the teach-back approach when educating patients
There is no way to know if the patient has understood everything correctly unless they dictate to you what they made out from your instruction. Stress, anxiety, or apprehension likely clouded their understanding during the education process, and they are now completely blank.
A practical method to overcome this hurdle is to use the teach-back method. It is essential to address this issue because research proves that 40-80% of the information provided to patients during visits is not retained after discharge, and half is misunderstood.
That is alarming because patients not following the instructions provided or following the misinterpreted instructions could pose a danger to their health post-discharge.
Therefore, incorporate the teach-back strategy in your repertoire; here, you ask the patients to state precisely what they understood in their own words. By doing so, you will know whether the patient has retained the information correctly and entirely or not.
Similar to the teach-back method, the show-me approach encourages patients to perform to you the self-care procedures they were just instructed about.
Use the right resources for patient education
A rigid one-size-fits-all approach to patient education will never yield 100% positive results because everyone has a different learning and response style. Each patient is unique; particularly when it comes to patient education, your resources should be diverse.
Ensure your teaching equipment incorporates visual aids, auditory cues, kinaesthetic and tactile demonstrations, and reading and writing material. This will ensure that all four basic learning styles are catered to.
One way you can achieve the same result is to ask the patient how they learn and then provide them with the resources best suited to their learning style.
Work on your communication skills
Communication is perhaps the most pervasive role registered nurses perform; working on the frontlines, nurses communicate information from the professionals to the patients.
For the best outcomes, nurses should practice active listening, foster trust, convey compassion and understanding, develop a solid positive rapport, and exhibit cultural awareness.
Also, nurses don’t just have to interact with their patients but also with a host of other people daily. As team members, nurses should be able to comprehend the instructions and follow them accurately.
Another often personally rewarding yet challenging task is to interact with the patient’s families. For others, nurses play the role of patient advocates, speaking on behalf of their patients in the hospital setting. In practically all these settings and more, nurses must be able to give the right verbal and non-verbal cues and thereby ensure the best patient care quality.
Final words
Nurses are among the most critical frontline workers, with the most significant implications for patient satisfaction. Your decisions, interaction strategy, and teaching approach will likely influence patient care quality as a nurse.
Make sure you are competent, exhibit empathy, provide patient-centered care, focus on patient education, and work on your communication skills. In the long run, these measures will yield positive outcomes for your organization and the patients.
