Patient Warming Plays a Significant Role in Patient Satisfaction, Clinical Outcomes

The focus is shifting to consumers, who are more empowered to make choices related to their care. And hospitals must now look at patients as customers — individuals who can choose where to receive care, weigh in on treatment options and even select the physicians who attend to them. To keep pace with this transformation, progressive facilities are thinking competitively and developing improvements that can raise the bar on patient care and satisfaction while also maintaining, or even enhancing, the bottom line.

Many hospital strategies to improve patient satisfaction seem to primarily focus on upgraded service amenities — room service dining or gourmet coffee — or revolve around improving the patient’s perception of care through cosmetic changes like attractive waiting areas and in-room plasma televisions.

Facilities may be better served by investing in patient satisfaction improvements that not only enhance the experience for their customers, but also bring clinical benefits that can improve patient outcomes. To be successful, hospitals must commit to improving the quality of care in substantive ways rather than simply implementing superficial enhancements.

According to Irwin Press, PhD, cofounder of Press Ganey Associates and author of Patient Satisfaction: Understanding and Managing the Experience of Care, “Of all the reasons for paying attention to patient satisfaction, only one transcends correctness, accountability, or accreditation standards — quality of care. Patient satisfaction is important because it is a component of care as well as an outcome of care. When patients are satisfied, both the immediate care and subsequent clinical outcomes are enhanced. At the same time, when the quality of care is high, satisfaction will be measurably high. This ‘double whammy’ should be sufficient to make improving and monitoring patient satisfaction a core concern of every healthcare institution and provider.”¹