(Press-News.org) Fast Facts:
Study reveals simple things hospitals can do to improve a patient's experience, including ongoing rounds by nurses and hospital leadership.
Study findings outline the following core practices that high-ranking hospitals employ: a devotion to consistency, personal and focused interactions with patients, and a culture that demands involvement of all levels of caregivers and services.
Based on responses to questionnaires and letters sent to CEOs and medical personnel from a nationwide sample of 53 hospitals, Johns Hopkins investigators have identified a handful of best practices they say are most likely to give patients a positive hospital experience, a sense of satisfaction and the feeling they come first.
Hospitals nationwide are competing, in part, to promote the idea of patient-centered care, a concept that includes everything from safer and timelier care to patient satisfaction with the level of attention and amenities. The new survey, the researchers say, was designed to uncover how high-performing hospitals get that way.
In a summary of its survey findings, published in the August issue of the journal Medical Care, the Johns Hopkins team concluded that medical staff members and leaders at hospitals that already ranked high on patient experiences of care shared a devotion to consistency, personal and focused interactions with patients, and a culture that demands involvement of all levels of caregivers and services.
"It's not just about getting the physicians involved, or the nurses," says lead study author Hanan Aboumatar, M.D., M.P.H., an assistant professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a member of the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality. "Everyone involved at the hospital, all the way up to top leadership, has to place a high priority on the needs of patients and their families."
For the survey, Aboumatar and her colleagues first identified 169 U.S. hospitals with a "top ranking" or a "most improved" designation based on their scores on the December 2012 Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey. The assessment is a national survey designed to measure patient experiences and satisfaction.
The Johns Hopkins team then sent letters to the CEOs of these hospitals, requesting participation in the study, and later anonymous questionnaires to key informants, including medical, nursing and administrative leaders, at the 53 hospitals that agreed to participate. The team received responses from 138 key informants from 52 of the 53 hospitals.
Aboumatar says the participating institutions -- in terms of size, teaching status and geographic location -- were a fair representation of the national hospital scene. In fact, 33 percent of the hospitals surveyed had 500 or more beds, 31 percent had 201 to 499 beds and 37 percent had less than 200 beds. Close to one-half of those surveyed were teaching hospitals, and the majority of the hospitals in the survey were located in the Midwest (37 percent).
At the organizational level, the results of the survey showed 77 percent reported that a commitment to the patient and family was a part of their culture and a key reason for their high performance.
"It may seem a simple thing," Aboumatar notes. "But if leaders and staff members don't prioritize this commitment and link it to the greater mission, it becomes easier to lose sight of it in the hectic pace of hospital care."
At the operations level, responsiveness was a key element, Aboumatar says. A particularly common approach was the practice of proactive nurse rounds, reported in 83 percent of the surveyed hospitals. Proactive rounds have nurses visit patients individually at periodic intervals and ask a set of specific questions related to patients' care. Similarly, leader rounds -- during which hospital leaders, including executives, visit patients and staff members to check on concerns or issues -- were also common in the top hospitals (some 62 percent).
Hospitals that were rated highly by their patients also promoted specific activities or behaviors, such as always making eye contact with patients or sitting at patients' bedsides, rather than standing or hovering over them.
"Importantly, we found that similar practices were occurring across the spectrum of the hospitals in our study," Aboumatar says. "It did not matter how many beds they had or whether they were an academic hospital. Also, these didn't need any high-tech resources. All that is required is commitment and a set of principles that any hospital can apply."
INFORMATION:
In addition to Aboumatar, other Johns Hopkins researchers involved in this study were Bickey Chang, Jad Al Danaf, Mohammad Shaear, Ruth Namuyinga, Sathyanarayanan Elumalai, Jill Marsteller and Peter Pronovost. The study was funded by a grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
Athens, Ga. - The time since the introduction of a non-native marine species best explains its global range, according to new research by an international team of scientists led by University of Georgia ecologist James E. Byers. The study, published in the open access journal Nature Scientific Reports, also contains a warning: The vast majority of marine invaders have not yet finished spreading.
Invasion by non-native species is a worldwide problem that causes billions of dollars of damage annually--more than $120 billion in the U.S. alone, according to a 2005 study ...
Berkeley -- The effort to improve food safety by clearing wild vegetation surrounding crops is not helping, and in some cases may even backfire, according to a new study led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.
The findings, to be reported Monday, Aug. 10, in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, call into question the effectiveness of removing non-crop vegetation as a way to reduce field contamination of fresh produce by disease-causing pathogens. This practice led to extensive loss of habitat in a region that is globally ...
Human memory is the result of different mental processes, such as learning, remembering and forgetting. However, these distinct processes cannot be observed directly. Researchers at the University of Basel now succeeded at describing them using computational models. The scientists were thus for the first time able to identify gene sets responsible for steering specific memory processes. Their results have been published in the current issue of the journal PNAS.
Thanks to our memory we are able to learn foreign languages, solve exams and remember beautiful moments from ...
Scientists have found that a newly identified and highly infectious tadpole disease is found in a diverse range of frog populations across the world. The discovery sheds new light on some of the threats facing fragile frog populations, which are in decline worldwide.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, led by the University of Exeter and the Natural History Museum, describes the molecular methods used to test frog tadpoles for a newly identified infectious agent.
Tadpoles from six countries across three continents were ...
A new study led by bioengineers at the University of California, San Diego defines the core set of genes and functions that a bacterial cell needs to sustain life. The research, which answers the fundamental question of what minimum set of functions bacterial cells require to survive, could lead to new cell engineering approaches for E. coli and other microorganisms, the researchers said.
The findings are published online in the early edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of August 10, 2015.
This core set of genes is "the smallest common ...
Astronomers at the 29th International Astronomical Union General Assembly will announce on August 14 the discovery of a new transiting "circumbinary" planet, bringing the number of such known planets into double digits. A circumbinary planet orbits two stars, and like the fictional planet "Tatooine" from Star Wars, this planet has two suns in its sky. The discovery marks an important milestone and comes only four years after the first Kepler circumbinary planet was detected. Once thought to be rare or even impossible, these ten discoveries confirm that such planets are ...
COLUMBIA, Mo. - Remarriages often combine two families into one stepfamily unit. When that stepfamily unit dissolves after a divorce, little is known about the relationships between former stepparents and stepchildren. Now, researchers in the University of Missouri College of Human Environmental Sciences found stepchildren's views of former stepparents depended on emotional reactions to the divorce, patterns of support or resource exchanges, and parental encouragement or discouragement to continue step-relationships. Whether stepchildren maintained relationships with their ...
COLUMBUS, Ohio - Researchers who have revealed a highly efficient way that bacteria use toxins to interrupt the immune response say that until now, the trickery of these toxins has been underappreciated in science.
Bacteria harm the body by releasing toxins - proteins that are exceptionally effective poisons. Always targeting essential molecules, toxins typically go after molecules that are either scarce or whose role is to send important signals. In both cases, only a small number of toxins is required to cause damage.
In contrast, some toxins appear to deviate from ...
Alexandria, Va., USA - Today, the International and American Associations for Dental Research (IADR/AADR) published two reports including a critical review titled "Diet and Dental Caries - the Pivotal Role of Free Sugars Reemphasized." In this study, authors Aubrey Sheiham, University College London, England; and W. Philip James, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, England, demonstrate the sensitivity of cariogenesis (the development of caries) to even very low sugars intakes. In this critical review, the authors reviewed the literature on the role of sucrose ...
Scientists at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center have identified a molecular partnership in pancreatic cancer cells that might help to explain how the disease spreads -- metastasizes -- in some cases. Their findings reveal urgently needed new targets to treat pancreatic cancer, which strikes nearly 50,000 people in the U.S. each year and has only a 5 percent survival rate five years after diagnosis.
One of the molecular partners is annexin A2, a protein that scientists say was already linked to poor survival rates in these cancers. In a report published in the Aug. ...
