North Sunflower Wins Patient Satisfaction Award

Look who Just Picked Up the Mississippi Rural Hospital Association Patient Satisfaction Award

By Hannah Barrett

As you might have heard us say, patient satisfaction is a job we take seriously. Very seriously. A happy patient is a healthy patient.

Over the past two years, we put a plan in place to measure and track how satisfied our patients were whenever they left our facilities. Over time, we’ve seen movement, made some necessary adjustments, and this month, all that hard work won. Big Time.

Last week, the Mississippi Rural Hospital Association recognized North Sunflower Medical Center with the Patient Satisfaction Award for the “Critical Access Hospital Division”.

Here’s how that happened:

The Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) is a patient satisfaction survey required by CMS (the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) for all hospitals in the United States. These numbers are very important. It’s an important survey that the public has access to and actually proves how we are doing on a day to day basis with meeting the needs of our patients.

We have worked extremely hard over the course of the last couple of years to improve our HCAHPS scores. It’s pretty simple to receive a complaint and be able to address the employee and go on about your business; however, HCAHPS is different. If there’s one patient that gives a bad review it can dramatically decrease your scores.

We have taken a dramatically different approach, by keeping everyone in the NSMC family (our staff members, doctors, nurses, and administrators) up to date on how we are doing each time the numbers are released. We have changed several different processes to ensure the patients are better cared for, which in return has increased our percentages.

We make sure a social worker, discharge coordinator, pharmacist, member of the administration, and case manager see each patient prior to discharge. This has helped to make sure the patients have a better understanding of their medications and it helps to identify any needs they have for their upcoming discharge.

Here at North Sunflower Medical Center, we believe in customer service. We try to explain to all of our newly hired employees that we are a family here at North Sunflower. If we treat our patients as family, as well as our co-workers, our scores will continue to improve. Receiving this award has been a great accomplishment. It is a piece of encouragement for all of our staff members to know that hard work pays off.