Patient Experience Week: A time to reflect on how you’ve made a difference
(SACRAMENTO)
Dear Colleagues,
Each year we celebrate Patient Experience Week. It’s a chance to recognize the role of health care workers in delivering kind, inclusive patient experiences.
It’s something we all have a hand in here at UC Davis Health. Our clinical teams deliver tremendous care, and our patients get the bonus of connecting with the talented, compassionate human beings that comprise our entire workforce.
Whether you’re repairing an aortic valve, safely shuttling patients to the hospital, helping a patient reschedule an appointment or drafting a process that gets them through the ED more efficiently, your service to patients comes from a place of purpose and compassion. I have tremendous gratitude for your work.
Patients are grateful as well. According to patient feedback surveys, our collective work is having a positive impact on the experiences our patients are having. Over the last three years, we have seen:
Improved ED experiences across all domains, from the arrival process to patient assessment, and elevated communication with doctors and nurses
Boosted teamwork in Radiology, as measured by the Staff Worked Well Together survey question
Achieved year-over-year improvement in our hospital’s Overall Rating, Care Transitions and Discharge experiences, as measured by Consumer Assessment of Hospitals and Healthcare Provider Systems (HCAHPS) surveys
Improved patient experiences in our clinics across all experience domains surveyed
In simple terms, our shared work has made the experiences of our patients better across every care setting. You’ve achieved all this despite a prolonged season of change, from the pandemic to campus construction to last week’s budget reduction news, which impacted 151 colleagues across the system, including half of the Experience Design team.
For this year’s Patient Experience Week, I feel the best way to honor your great work, along with the great work of those individuals, is to celebrate our joint achievements for patients and their loved ones.
I hope you will understand and support the employees who remain on those most impacted teams. It will require members of other teams to come alongside those teams to assist and continue to move the great work forward.
Good experience is what everyone does, not just the experience team. Take time to reflect and celebrate how you have and will continue to make a difference.
I honor and recognize your role in patient experience and, thus, our collective human experience. We are in this together. It has been my pleasure to serve alongside you in this work.
