School of Medicine and Health Sciences Poster Presentations
Care Team Face Sheets: A quality improvement project to enhance patient-provider communication
Document Type
Poster
Keywords
quality improvement; patient satisfaction; patient education; patient communication
Publication Date
Spring 2017
Abstract
BACKGROUND
Inability to name one’s physician has been shown to be associated with worse patient understanding of plan of care, medication changes, and discharge instructions. We believe that the creation of a Care Team Face Sheet (“Face Sheet”) provides a novel means to help patients identify their inpatient providers and improve patient-provider communication.
AIM
We sought improvement of over 10% in three different scores of patient perception of care and communication with their hospital physicians after completing our intervention over the time period from July 2015 through February 2017.
METHODS
Our intervention involved distribution of a Face Sheet, which is a document that provides labeled photos of each member on the primary inpatient medical team and describes each team member’s role. These sheets are printed by a member of the primary team and handed out to patients at admission or shortly thereafter.
We began our project in July 2015 with a survey of 100 hospitalized internal medicine patients to collect baseline data on patient demographics, whether they were able to name one of their physicians, and their satisfaction scores around communication, understanding their plan of care, and their overall hospital experience, using a 1-5 Likert scale.
Over the following 18 months, we completed several PDSA cycles aimed at increasing the distribution of Face Sheets by the residents to their patients. After each intervention, which usually lasted 2-3 weeks, we performed a random survey of 10 patients to see if they had received a Face Sheet.
At the conclusion of our intervention, we collected 50 surveys of patients to compare with our baseline data.
RESULTS
We found that distribution of the Face Sheets was lower than anticipated, persisting around 10%, despite several months of PDSA cycles and various interventions. Assessing the barriers to distribution in a qualitative fashion, we found that residents overwhelmingly believed Face Sheets to be useful to their patients, however they cited an overwhelming amount of small tasks and things to remember during the days as barriers to adopting a new workflow process.
We found modest improvements in patient satisfaction scores including 6.7% for understanding plan of care, 9.4% in satisfaction with communication, and 4.2% in overall satisfaction with hospitalization.
DISCUSSION
Barriers to implementing a new work flow process included frequent resident turnover, resident burnout, and need for support from physician leadership. We still believe that increased distribution would lead to lasting improvements in patient provider communication
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Open Access
1
Care Team Face Sheets: A quality improvement project to enhance patient-provider communication
BACKGROUND
Inability to name one’s physician has been shown to be associated with worse patient understanding of plan of care, medication changes, and discharge instructions. We believe that the creation of a Care Team Face Sheet (“Face Sheet”) provides a novel means to help patients identify their inpatient providers and improve patient-provider communication.
AIM
We sought improvement of over 10% in three different scores of patient perception of care and communication with their hospital physicians after completing our intervention over the time period from July 2015 through February 2017.
METHODS
Our intervention involved distribution of a Face Sheet, which is a document that provides labeled photos of each member on the primary inpatient medical team and describes each team member’s role. These sheets are printed by a member of the primary team and handed out to patients at admission or shortly thereafter.
We began our project in July 2015 with a survey of 100 hospitalized internal medicine patients to collect baseline data on patient demographics, whether they were able to name one of their physicians, and their satisfaction scores around communication, understanding their plan of care, and their overall hospital experience, using a 1-5 Likert scale.
Over the following 18 months, we completed several PDSA cycles aimed at increasing the distribution of Face Sheets by the residents to their patients. After each intervention, which usually lasted 2-3 weeks, we performed a random survey of 10 patients to see if they had received a Face Sheet.
At the conclusion of our intervention, we collected 50 surveys of patients to compare with our baseline data.
RESULTS
We found that distribution of the Face Sheets was lower than anticipated, persisting around 10%, despite several months of PDSA cycles and various interventions. Assessing the barriers to distribution in a qualitative fashion, we found that residents overwhelmingly believed Face Sheets to be useful to their patients, however they cited an overwhelming amount of small tasks and things to remember during the days as barriers to adopting a new workflow process.
We found modest improvements in patient satisfaction scores including 6.7% for understanding plan of care, 9.4% in satisfaction with communication, and 4.2% in overall satisfaction with hospitalization.
DISCUSSION
Barriers to implementing a new work flow process included frequent resident turnover, resident burnout, and need for support from physician leadership. We still believe that increased distribution would lead to lasting improvements in patient provider communication
Comments
Poster to be presented at GW Annual Research Days 2017.