 case studies / examples
A unit in a large hospital looks for a way to provide the best possible experience of care for demanding patients.
The staff recognized a “profile” for a family that had a difficult time in their unit. They identified these families as having a “closed culture”. They were currently working hard to provide a good experience of care for such a family.
- One of the parents was in the daughter’s room all the time
- The parents requested that their daughter receive no visitors
- They asked that the press not receive information about their daughter
- They fought amongst each other, occasionally loudly
- They were put off at having to work with new nurses
- The father had a laundry list of complaints and was upset with the nurses even as they were helping him find solutions to his problems
The staff was frightened to work with the family. Confrontations were common and they often escalated.
Interplay created a custom training program with three goals:
- Increase the staff’s ability to make their compassion visible to patients. Clearly, the staff was compassionate. Their compassion had driven their interest in training. They just needed a procedure for making that compassion plain to patients, especially those they saw as demanding.
- Give the staff a process for digging beneath the complaints to uncover the patients’ underlying needs.
- Help the staff learn to “step off the emotional line of fire”. In other words, give the staff skills to work through solutions with patients who were upset without taking on guilt or blame for the way patients feel.
The training program featured five live scenarios. We trained professional actors to recreate the interactions the staff had identified as very challenging. We used the first scenario to teach the staff a step-by-step process for demonstrating empathy. The trainees received one-on-one coaching through the remaining four scenarios.
Staff returned to the clinic with a new attitude and approach. They understood and embraced the family's needs. Confrontations continued but tended not to escalate. The staff preferred to handle them personally. The family asked to delay transfer out of the department. Moreover, staff members who received training took their own initiative and personal time to brief the staff from the next department that would receive the family.
Finally, discussions between Interplay and staff members revealed that families who seemed demanding also tended to come from the ICU. The patients are in grave health and their families feel powerless to help them. Once the patients are released to a medical floor, the families have a pent up need to be active in the patient’s care. Hence, the laundry lists of complaints.
Equipped with this realization, the staff was better prepared to anticipate the needs of an entire class of patients and create policies and practices to give them a better experience of care (both keys to creating higher patient satisfaction and loyalty).
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