Being in the industry and hearing about the pain that hospitals experience from patient satisfaction has raised an interesting question in my mind – is HCAHPS all just a big hoax?
When hospitals have the potential to lose millions of dollars over whether a patient answers ‘Never’ as compared to ‘Always’ when asked if their physician treated them with courtesy and respect, are we losing sight of the reason why physicians are even in existence? My honest answer is maybe! As humans, we are emotional beings, but when did we start caring more about how someone makes us feel emotionally over how someone saves our life physically?
Please don’t get me wrong – I do believe in customer service as I used to dedicate my life to assisting hospitals in measuring and improving their HCAHPS scores (because as we know it’s not all about being the best with patient satisfaction, it’s also about improving), but after my husband had a freak accident and ended up in the emergency room I started viewing things a little differently.
Let me paint you a picture. My husband is a 29-year-old healthy individual. He exercises regularly and is fairly cognizant about what he consumes. He visits his primary care physician yearly and has never had any health concerns. Knowing this, you can imagine the complete feeling of panic that rushed over me when he mentioned he had a headache and within an instant fell to the floor (not to mention the fact that I was 6 months pregnant with our first child). After what felt like hours, he regained consciousness as emergency services were arriving. When we got to the emergency room, the scared feeling still had not managed to escape as we were both curious what could have caused this healthy, young individual to have such a thing happen.
When the physician finally came in, there was no lovey dovey greeting; no ‘nice to meet you’ comments. He had a name tag on and didn’t bother to introduce himself or ask us our names. There were no comments on how I was obviously pregnant and no questions on if we knew what we were having (like the rest of the world was so desperate to know). He did not smile and he uncomfortably kept his hands in his lab coat pockets the entire four hours we were there. He did not look either of us in the eye and he had a slight nervous stutter. Despite his social awkwardness, he was the best physician I had ever come across. He told us exactly what happened with my husband in both medical and laymen’s terms and this was all we needed. We didn’t need him to say anything but the facts and explain in a way we could understand. For those of you who are interested, it was a complete fluke and this ‘random act of passing out’ can and does happen to millions of people every year.
So really in the whole scheme of things, I would much rather have a physician who knows his ‘stuff’ and can tell me things in a way I can understand, than one who sugar coats everything and acts like it’s all rainbows and butterflies. That is why we trust physicians with our lives, right? Because they are the EXPERTS in MEDICINE, not because they won a Miss Congeniality contest?
Jordan Brabec joined Aureus Medical Group in March 2012. She is a Physician Search Consultant and Regional Account Manager for the Physicians Division, recruiting physicians as well as obtaining and maintaining relationships with healthcare systems, hospitals, clinics, and groups. In her free time, Jordan enjoys spending time with her husband and their young son.