Access

Patients want access to care and are frustrated by the barriers they often encounter. Patients need access to different things depending on the setting of the care. In the hospital, patients want their doctors and nurses to be available as well as the ability to get all the services they need.

Continuity and Transition

Patients often express considerable anxiety about their ability to care for themselves after discharge. Meeting patient needs in this area requires staff to provide understandable, detailed information regarding the purpose of medications and their side effects, danger signals about their condition to watch for, when they can resume usual activities and who to call for help or to get questions answered after discharge.

Coordination of Care

Patients report that they feel vulnerable and powerless in the face of illness. Proper coordination of care can ease those feelings. Patients identified areas in which care coordination can reduce feelings of vulnerability. They are: an organized admission process; no unnecessary long wait to go to their room; one particular doctor in charge of care; doctors and nurses saying the same thing to the patient; and scheduled tests and procedures performed on time.

Emotional Support

Fear and anxiety associated with illness can be as debilitating as the physical effects. Caregivers should pay particular attention to doctors and nurses discussing anxieties and fears with the patient about their condition or treatment, the patient’s confidence and trust in the doctors and nurses who are treating them, and ease in finding someone on the hospital staff to discuss concerns.

Information and Education 

Patients express a fear that information is being withheld from them and that staff are not being completely honest about their condition and prognosis. Based on patient interviews, hospital staff can focus on these communication items to reduce these fears: when the patient has important questions to ask the doctor and nurse they receive answers they can understand, the doctor or nurse explains test results in an understandable way, and someone from the hospital explains the reason for the delay if the patient has to wait to go to their room.

Involvement of Family

Patients continually address the role of family and friends in the patient experience, and often they express concern about the impact illness has on family. Family dimensions of patient centred care are identified as the family having enough opportunity to talk with the doctor, information about the patient’s condition or treatment is given to family or someone close to the patient, and the doctors and nurses give the family all the information needed to help the patient recover.

Physical Comfort

The level of patients’ physical comfort has a tremendous impact on their experience. These areas are reported as particularly important to patients: pain management including time to receive pain medication after the request, the amount of pain medicine received, as well as the perception that the hospital staff did everything possible to help control the pain, assistance with activities of daily living including help getting to the bathroom, amount of time to receive help after using the call button and as well as the perception that the amount of time waiting for help was reasonable.

Respect for Patient Preferences

Patients indicate a need to be recognized and treated as individuals by hospital staff. They are concerned with their illnesses and conditions and want to be kept informed. An atmosphere respectful of the individual patient should focus on involving the patient in treatment decisions, treating the patient with dignity and respect, and doctors and nurses not talking in front of the patient as if they weren’t there.