Video: Patient experience depends on all Texas Children’s employees no matter their role

August 25, 2015

Texas Children’s is committed to providing the highest quality patient care, a critical component of which is how our patients and their families experience that care. As we continue to grow, it is our responsibility to ensure we provide a consistently exceptional experience system wide.

Recognizing the importance of the patient experience and its integral role in quality patient care, we have created several teams to drive improvements in our patient and family experience. During the past 10 months, hundreds of leaders, physicians, and employees on those teams have reviewed the feedback we receive on our patient satisfaction surveys and helped implement more than 25 projects aimed at improving the patient and family experience throughout Texas Children’s.

The patient satisfaction survey is administered by Press Ganey to patient families on all three of our campuses (Main Campus, West Campus and the Pavilion for Women). Every patient encounter is eligible for a survey, including the scheduling process, the courtesy of our staff members and our billing procedures.

We track our performance in 14 clinical areas across the system and our scores are compared to those of similarly sized children’s and women’s hospitals across the country. This year, we set our goals to ensure we perform better than at least half of the other hospitals surveyed by Press Ganey. This goal is aligned with our organizational goal to raise satisfaction score performance system wide.

We survey families throughout the year, therefore families you encounter each and every day will be surveyed about their experience. We need to work together to ensure they receive the best possible experience. According to our patients who are surveyed, two things we need to focus on are: showing concern for their needs and keeping them informed about any delays that might occur. If you have not participated in one of the many improvement projects this year, talk to your leader about the efforts in your area targeted to enhance the patient and family experience.

In the words of Texas Children’s President and CEO Mark A. Wallace: “If our care is absent of compassion, we are not fulfilling our promise to our patients and their families. From the moment a family member calls to schedule an appointment, their experience with us begins, and every single thing that happens thereafter will leave a lasting impression.”

We encourage all employees and physicians to watch Mr. Wallace’s video on this subject and think about how you and your teams can improve the experience starting now.