As we move through the summer and see third quarter patient survey results begin to come in, it is a good time to take stock of where things are with regard to recovering the patient experience in our organizations. At NewYork-Presbyterian, we have seen a strong rebound in our ratings as the year has unfolded, after a very challenging start in the first quarter.
To what do we credit our improvement? There are two main factors.
One is a robust and ongoing effort to recruit and retain staff. The patient experience crisis we weathered last year was definitely linked, along with other factors, to an unprecedented staffing crisis. Hospitals across the country experienced dramatic staffing challenges during the Omicron surge at the end of last year and the start of 2022. This, coupled with pandemic fatigue and the "Great Resignation," fueled a historic drop in patient experience metrics nationwide.
With each passing month in 2022, we have begun to achieve stability in our staffing and meaningfully restore presence at the bedside. That, in turn, has helped us find our feet again with the patient experience. This work is not finished, but we are making progress. Good patient experience and its essential components — empathy, connection and communication — require this important staffing foundation to be in place. Our patient experience team has partnered with our operations leaders and human resources colleagues as never before. It is critical that we track staffing together because it helps us choose both the content and pace of our patient experience recovery work.
The second factor has been a disciplined and relentless pursuit of strategies to both recover proven patient experience best practices and to innovate in that same space. For example, we have restored and broadened nurse leader rounding, reestablishing and expanding a critical touchpoint that connects the dots for our patients and families. This is real work for our nurse leaders, and we are grateful for their effort. We have also restructured our approach for making discharge calls to once again assure we are reaching out to close to 100 percent of our patients. As we look at this expansion of rounds and calls, we see a correlating rise in key aspects of the experience like nurse communication, communication about medications and discharge planning.
Our strategy also includes leveraging technology to create more touch points and augment communication. This includes optimizing our in-room television systems to supplement and facilitate patient education and leveraging our EMR at the bedside to bolster communication touchpoints. While it is too early to draw definitive conclusions, we believe we are seeing the first green shoots of the benefit of this work, both in patient ratings and in staff engagement and satisfaction.
Through the work described above, we believe our ever-expanding strategy is also driving our recovery. While we are happy with this progress, old and new challenges present themselves.
One is the fact that the pandemic, despite our fervent desire for it to be otherwise, continues to ripple through our institutions. Across the country, we are still seeing significant COVID-19 patient loads and virus spread. Along with that comes familiar, but still vexing, effects on patient experience, including restrictions on visitation, burdensome screening requirements and supply chain issues. We are experiencing the patient experience version of "long Covid" — lingering effects that make it impossible to fully recover the environment and experience we all desire. These challenges require us to execute a delicate balancing act of bringing best practices to the front line even when some pandemic-related limitations remain. Right now, patient experience improvement work requires an almost daily assessment and titration of effort and focus — trying to chart our improvement course alongside that of the pandemic.
A newer obstacle relates to staffing. While we are thrilled with our progress in restoring staffing, we are also facing perhaps the largest wave of new employees — both new to our organizations and some even new to their profession or to healthcare — in our history. New graduates and new employees bring new life, optimism and energy to our organization and we embrace them! But they also bring a need for them to be enculturated and trained in our expectations and practices related to patient experience. We have had to build and expand programs to welcome and train new hires and to support them as they begin their journey with us. This is training of a whole new order from what we have done in the past. And, we have had to move fast to address that need.
So — how are we doing in this summer of 2022? We are more optimistic and hopeful than we have been for a while, but the challenges of recovery remain — some old and familiar and others new. The challenge for patient experience improvement teams right now is to remain nimble, relentless and adaptable. This is the work of the moment for us.