Quick tips turn Oops!’ into Aahs!’
7 strategies for assessing, fixing complaint system
Even if your company doesn’t receive many patient complaints, you should collect and use data about the complaints you do receive, experts advise.
"It’s no good to write up complaints and not look at them later. You can’t just pull them out when the Joint Commission [on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations] comes to survey you," says Lorraine Waters, BSN, MA, executive director, Southern Home Care, Jeffersonville, IN.
How can you know whether your patient complaint tracking process is thorough? To check, hospital-based home care agencies should ask themselves these four simple questions, say Waters and Nancy Woods, RN, specialty services director, Contin-U-Care Home Health, Chattanooga, TN:
• Is my patient complaint data collection system working?
One way to find this out is to survey your employees about how well the system works. For example, you could ask them who owns patient complaints that are reported to them. You want to hear answers such as, "Whoever receives the complaint," or "all employees." If you don’t, then you need to educate staff about your system, Woods says.
• Do patients’ complaints and problems always get solved?
If you don’t know, or if you know they don’t always get solved, then you need to upgrade your system, Woods says.
• Is my company’s upper management aware of patients’ complaints and problem trends?
If not, you may need to alter the reporting part of your system, but not the data collection element of it, Woods says.
• Does my company track patient complaints over the long term and compile statistics about them?
To know your company’s patient satisfaction levels, you must develop statistics about patient complaints, Woods says. This might not require that you completely overhaul your system for handling complaints. You might only need to compile and tabulate the data you already collect.
"If any of the answers to these questions is a surprise to you, you need to improve your system," Woods says. If you do decide to improve your company’s patient complaint tracking process, use these three steps to do so, Woods and Waters say:
• Involve your colleagues in the changes you make.
Brainstorm with your top level management about what the problems with the current system are and how to track complaints better, Waters advises.
It is easy to confuse system compliance problems and system problems, so you need to make sure your process for tracking patient complaints actually needs an overhaul before you change it, Woods and Waters say.
"We use a process we call PDCA,’ or plan, do, correct, and analyze, to change systems for the better. You have to plan and study the changes you’ll make and ask, Where are we starting from? What is the process we should use?’" Woods says.
Several revisions may be needed
• Be prepared to revise the changes you make.
"We changed the forms we designed four or five times. At first, we had too much on them," Woods says. The first versions of the OFIs Woods and her colleagues designed attempted to identify accreditation standards broken and internal standards violated. This was both too time-consuming and too much to ask of some of the people who would be using the forms.
"You have to identify the people who will be using forms, taking information, and dealing with problem calls, and design the forms accordingly. Not everyone can do what we were asking at first," Woods says.
• Share your activities with all staff.
As with most aspects of managing a home care agency, your staff will find it easier to comply with what you ask them to do if they know why you want them to do it, Woods and Waters explain.
Once you do start tracking patient complaints and tabulating the data, share your findings with your staff nurses, Waters advises.
"Go to them and say, This is what we were told by patients. What did you see happen?’ You need to know both sides of the complaint, and your staff need to know you’re on their side," Waters says.
Sometimes a nurse will come right out and admit having made a mistake, making resolving the patient complaint a lot easier and faster, Waters says.
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