Nursing

’How’s Your Care’ focuses on improving the patient experience

Staff Development Weekly: Insight on Evidence-Based Practice in Education, August 11, 2006

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In an effort to improve patient care, Duke University Medical Center in Durham, NC, and Cheshire Medical Center/Dartmouth Hitchcock Keene (NH) began a program in June called "How's Your Care." The survey, which patients take while still in the hospital, asks questions such as the following:

  • Have you felt pushed to undergo a test or treatment?
  • Have the doctors or nurses paid attention to important information that you gave them?
  • Have you received enough medicine for pain?
  • Have you been told when you will be leaving the hospital?
  • How prepared are you and your family or caregiver to manage or control problems after leaving the hospital?
  • If you needed someone to help out with cooking, taking care of the house, bathing, dressing, and eating, is there someone whom you could count on to give help like that?
  • Do you have enough money for everyday needs such as food, clothing, or housing?
  • Overall, what do you need most now to make your care as good as it can be and the chances for recovery as high as they can be?

After taking the online survey, the program prints a form summarizing the patient's needs, which the patient is asked to give to his or her hospital care team.

To learn more about the program, go to Briefings on Quality Improvement and Data (BQIDR). For the cost of just three stories, you can get the entire August issue of BQIDR. Click here to choose between the PDF and HTML versions for just $30. Subscribers to the online version of BQIDR have free access to this article. Subscribers to the print newsletter can find this article in their August issue.



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