With an eye to patient-centered care, there’s a push for hospitals to put more emphasis on improving the patient experience. Pediatric hospitals fill their patients’ days with activities, bathe their single rooms in natural light and let family sleep over. Could they be a useful model for improving adult hospitals?
An editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association thinks so. It suggests that hospitals could be missing an opportunity by not embracing these quality of life issues to heart.
Mark Attiah, a student at the Perelman School of Medicine at University of Pennsylvania shared his thoughts on ways hospitals could ease the fears and anxieties of their adult patients.
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“Adult hospitals… can take a page from the pediatric playbook by creating surroundings that distract and reduce stress and by making clinical practices more patient – and family-oriented rather than more convenient for the caretakers.”
Think fewer white coats to create a less sterile looking environment. He also points out how tough it is for patients accustomed to a children’s hospital environment to make the transition to a setting where there’s much less privacy and the mood is much different.
“This rite of passage from the child to adult patient underscores the tacit assumption that adult patients have developed a certain hardiness; a stiff upper lip that renders a reasonably pleasant environment or even sometimes a complete patient-physician trust unnecessary…. The truth is that without help most people, regardless of their age, aren’t naturally good at being patients.”
One of the most interesting points raised by Attiah is that children’s hospitals tend to have more respect for family in code blue situations. Although adult hospitals tend to require family to leave the room pediatric hospitals, for the past five to 10 years, have no such ban.
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At a time when hospitals face daunting costs in shifting over to electronic health records, reductions in Medicare reimbursement and more liability than before, making some aesthetic and cultural changes probably are not very high on their priority lists. But with the shift from fee-for-service to outcomes based care, patient satisfaction will play a bigger role in physician salaries.
