The word "suffering" is largely avoided by medical professionals when discussing patients' conditions. They instead opt for language that removes the association between a patient's pain and their medical care, Thomas H Lee, MD, CMO of Press Ganey, told The New York Times.
Now, the goal of reducing patient suffering caused by medical care has become a top priority for many organizations. According to NYT, the movement is motivated partially by organizations' increasing use of patient experience surveys as a strategic marketing tool to boost reputation and ensure loyalty among patients, and partially by the realization that different kinds of suffering experienced during episodes of care pose real problems for both patients and hospitals.
Kenneth Sands, MD, chief quality officer of Harvard's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, told NYT he and his colleagues asked their own patients what made them suffer. Common responses included instances in which a physician practiced poor communication, when hospital staff lost a patient's valuable possession or displayed insensitivity to patients' desires for privacy.
"These harms elicit suffering," Dr. Sands told NYT. "They can be long lasting, and they currently are largely unquantified, uncounted and unrecorded."
Hospitals across the country are taking steps to address, measure and remedy patient suffering caused by processes or people involved in patients' medical care. Increasingly, hospitals and health systems are turning to surveys to measure patient suffering — even if the questions don't explicitly ask about suffering.
For example, Michael Bennick, MD, medical director of patient experience at Yale-New Haven Hospital noticed the question on Medicare's Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers & Systems that asks, "Is your room quiet at night?" According to NYT, Dr. Bennick interpreted the question as really asking, "Can you get a good night sleep in the hospital?" He subsequently decided it was not necessary for residents and physicians to wake patients up at night to administer tests for vital signs that could be performed at other times, and instructed his unit not to.
Since then, the medical unit's score on that question rose from the 16th percentile to 47th nationally, prompting the rest of the hospital to follow suit. This change didn't cost any money, Dr. Bennick pointed out, just thinking from the patient's perspective.
While some circumstances can produce misleading survey results, Scott Ramsey, MD, a healthcare economist and cancer researcher at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, told NYT suffering is a real issue in healthcare, and surveys can be a valuable tool for guiding hospitals' efforts to reduce it.