Fear as Part of the Patient Experience
Dan PrinceNext Tuesday, August 16, Colleen Sweeney will be presenting a webinar on a topic that isn’t discussed nearly enough in healthcare circles: Patient Fears.
Colleen Sweeney is Director of Innovation in Customer Services at Memorial Hospital and Health System in South Bend, Indiana. Her presentation will be based on a three-year study of patient fears that she led at Memorial and about the transformation in the care culture it has triggered there.
This webinar is going to be very good. I know Colleen, and I have heard her speak. She uses everything she learned doing improv comedy years ago to make her seminars and webinars a lot of fun – and very thought-provoking.
The webinar is part of the Beryl Institute’s Conference Encore series. Sign-up information is here: http://theberylinstitute.site-ym.com/events/event_details.asp?id=163365
I was thinking about patient fears as I talked to a friend of mine about her recent experience in the hospital with her father. Her father lives far from where she does, and she stayed in the ICU with him for several days and nights. He had had emergency abdominal surgery and suffered a heart attack on the operating table.
For her, the hospital experience was predominantly about fear. She feared for her father’s life. The doctors had to stabilize his condition after the surgery and delayed the tests to see how much artery damage had been done – how serious a heart attack he had had. Were the three doctors attending him, three different specialists, really getting the priorities right?
She thought that information was poorly coordinated at the hospital, and that made her fearful, too. She and her dad had to go through his history, what had happened with the surgery and the heart attack, what his prescription medicines were – all of it several times with different nurses and doctors. Each of the nurses was entering the information into a computer system, but the next nurse down the line didn’t seem to be accessing it. She worried that some nurse or doctor, with only partial knowledge, might order a procedure or a medication – or a meal – that could turn out to be harmful.
She had other fears. She worried that he might turn over in bed and get unhooked from one of the many tubes and monitors he was attached to. She woke up often in the night to check the screen and make sure it was still showing a regular heart beat.
She worried about infection. A colleague at work had died of a staph infection contracted in the hospital. She watched every doctor, nurse and PCA and how they gloved up and handled instruments and meds, and she thought about what they might be carrying from room to room.
Many of her fears were probably unfounded. But they defined her experience of this hospital. She didn’t express them, but then nobody asked.
Colleen Sweeney says that throughout the healthcare system patients – and their spouses, daughters and sons – are rarely asked whether they’re afraid and what they’re afraid of. She is making sure that Memorial in South Bend asks. It’s starting to make profound changes in the hospital’s culture and in patient experience.
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