Care team recognition is an essential component of a broader workforce strategy, but many provider organizations have yet to fully deploy team recognition programs.
During a June Becker's Hospital Review podcast sponsored by NRC Health, Amy Feeder, customer experience program manager at M Health Fairview (Minn.), and Jon Tanner, program director of human understanding at NRC Health, discussed effective approaches to implementing a team recognition strategy.
Three key insights were:
- Staff well-being and satisfaction are key to ensuring high-quality patient care. Sharing patient stories, compliments and thank-you notes from patients and families with front-line care teams can go a long way toward boosting morale and resilience. "Care team recognition and sharing kudos is one of the ways we combat burnout and compassion fatigue," Ms. Feeder said.
This is especially relevant in the context of urgent or emergency care, where care teams do not usually get to see the same patients again and thus cannot get direct feedback or observe the difference they may have made in those patients' lives. - To ensure that patient feedback reaches front-line teams, leaders must establish a system. M Health Fairview uses a tiered management strategy where the first prompt of every daily huddle is to share "shoutouts" or recognitions. "Sharing patient stories, taking the time to reflect on that patient's experience and acknowledging the staff that played a role helps that staff member connect back to purpose," Ms. Feeder said. She noted that leaders often receive hundreds of patient comments, yet those comments do not always trickle down to the people who are providing the care.
Mr. Tanner added that organizations can support a culture of recognition by including questions in patient feedback surveys that ask whether the respondent wishes to recognize a particular team member. Decentralizing where patient feedback is pooled, such that front-line team leaders and not just executives or top managers have access to it, is another approach to ensuring feedback reaches clinicians. "Healthcare organizations are so large that who knows which David or which Shawn is getting complimented — but their peers and their front-line leaders do," Mr. Tanner said. - Not implementing a care team recognition strategy puts organizations at risk. The greatest risk is in having staff not feel appreciated, with the implications this has for dampening staff morale, increasing burnout and intensifying potential turnover and staffing shortages. "If patients are giving this wealth of feedback and recognition and we're not sharing it with the team, that's a huge miss," Ms. Feeder said.
Not sharing patient feedback can further perpetuate a perception of patient experience programs as something negative, Mr. Tanner noted. "Patient experience can be viewed as a bad news discipline, like, 'Here's your grade, here's your benchmark, you aren't reaching your benchmark.' Patient feedback is about understanding what matters to patients . . . and that starts with understanding what are all the things patients think you already do great."