While medical expertise, bedside manner and efficiencies of care might top the list of things that patients say are important, another process touches guests in a healthcare facility extensively: patient transport. From the time patients enter the facility through all the procedures and examinations they undergo to final discharge, the patients or their specimens are in regular movement across the facility. Small inefficiencies or issues in transport can add up to big problems for individual patients or for the facility in total.
A first step in improving patient transport is understanding where it occurs. Looking at patient flow with a value stream analysis is extremely effective in seeing all the places where transport takes place and what kinds of bottlenecks or wait times are created.
Consider these and other transport paths as you construct a transport value stream map:
The value stream will include not only the process steps, but also the number of people involved. Many facilities find that when designated transport personnel are not available, nurses and other clinical staff step in to make moves happen. While this may be expedient for a given patient, it is likely to be harmful in the long term as it removes these staff members from their specialized duties, possibly creating other bottlenecks or potentially leading to errors in health care.
Transport may not come to the top of the list of stated patient dissatisfiers, but if you probe, patients might express concerns such as these:
As with other parts of the patient workflow, it’s important to complete an assessment to gather patient input rather than simply make assumptions about these or other issues. When you have gathered and organized data from observations and patient surveys, be sure to complete root cause analyses of any problems identified. For example, is a transport delay due to slow personnel or does it stem from backup at another department in the facility? Because transport problems are likely to show up as bottlenecks, they often indicate underlying issues in operating processes that need to be fixed.
Using the information gathered from analyses of observations and survey input, you will create a plan of attack to achieve operational excellence in transport within the framework of overall patient care. This plan is likely to include:
Remember that psychologists recommend focusing on the peak and end of customer experiences to favorably influence overall satisfaction. Patient transport is generally the last step of the patient’s on-site experience with the hospital, thus it becomes the “end” experience. This can be positive as the patient begins his or her path to recovery or it can leave a bad last impression, often a lasting impression.
Be sure the transport process at discharge is efficient. A patient who is ready to leave wants to leave NOW. Make sure transport staff are well trained, not just on routings through the hospital, but also on “bedside” manner. It may be just as important to train entry-level staff pushing wheelchairs on how to interact pleasantly with patients as it is to train physicians and nurses.
If you're determined to achieve operational excellence within your organization, you need a process to follow, standards to assess against, and a system to host it. To start this assessment, contact us today.