Ensuring that each patient and his or her family is treated the same way, in every circumstance, is critical to a positive Patient Experience. Many hospitals have implemented strategies like “Words that Work” and other communication formulas in an attempt to achieve this goal.
“Words that Work” are scripts or phrases that target specific HCAHPS indicators designed to help connect patients with staff on both clinical and emotional levels. They allow the hospital to essentially become the author of their own screenplay where the final scene ends with loyalty ever after and stellar patient experience scores. “Words that Work” help each healthcare worker say it over and over again with feeling.
Effective and consistent communication between hospital staff themselves can likewise be the means to an end in the quest to boost the measurement of patient experience: patient satisfaction scores. Tools to help with inter-hospital communication gives the facility some measure of quality control. Staffing shortages and the current culture of being encouraged to do more with less, have created a time management and priority crunch like none other in hospital history.
Information given both between healthcare workers and between patients and their caregivers desperately needs to be streamlined. Ineffective, unclear, or inconsistent communication was cited in the 2007 Joint Commission’s Annual Report on Quality and Safety as being the root cause of unexpected health and safety risk or actual patient harm. Basically, you’ve got to be able to talk the talk if you want your patient to walk the walk – safely out of your hospital.
But what is the best approach to reach all of your staff consistently and regularly, achieving a goal like “every patient, every time?” And more importantly, how do you do that without losing the heart of healthcare or the individualized needs of each patient and healthcare provider?
Watch and learn. A video can personalize communication techniques and clinical speak in ways that are so much more effective than a pamphlet or a lecture. You can visually illustrate not only things like “Words that Work,” but how important tone, delivery and body language are to putting emotion into every situation. Try to get a brochure to do that! When these critical conversations often mean the difference between life and death for patients, getting to the heart of the matter and comprehensively reaching every healthcare worker with your message is imperative. And what better way to teach these various communication techniques than to show staff exactly what that looks like AND doesn’t look like?
We recently did a series of videos for AHRQ that involved TeamSTEPPS and crucial conversations, teaching healthcare workers various acronyms that help them readily remember communication tools in critical situations. One of the acronyms emphasized three very important CUS words. Now before you go washing my mouth out with hospital disinfectant, CUSsing can be a good thing when it comes to healthcare. CUS (Concerned, Uncomfortable, Safety) reminds healthcare workers to be professional and courteous when communicating a rising level of concern to another care provider. Illustrating the point with three simple CUS words, when appropriate, is the ideal way to get your point across, and video the ideal vehicle to do it.
With video, you can readily convey what happens when you use communication tools like CUS, and how it looks and sounds when you don’t. Contrast Creative wrote scripts for this project that showed the good and the bad sides of the communication spectrum. Initially we filmed various healthcare scenarios using actors managing difficult situations utilizing words that work, and CUS. But then we flipped it and filmed the exact same scenarios using words, behaviors, emotions and body language that, well…definitely didn’t work very well.
These crafted situations were able to show that though a healthcare worker often isn’t in control of which challenges they face during their shift with patients or co-workers, they are able to control how they handle or react to them. Allowing healthcare workers to visualize and experience the impact of these techniques through video provides a safe place to practice consistent, effective and meaningful communication while all working from the same script. The result? A better patient experience. And that’s the kind of happy ending we all want to watch.