By Amanda Anderson, a critical care nurse and graduate student in New York City currently doing a graduate placement at AJN. 

During this hospital stay, after you pressed the call button, how often did you get help as soon as you wanted it?
1. Never
2. Sometimes
3. Usually
4. Always
5. I never pressed the call button

Everyone is talking about patient satisfaction these days. Purposeful rounding, responsiveness, and customer service are discussed in meetings, on blogs, and in conversations at work. An entire science has been created out of satisfaction, with whole journals devoted to patient experience and paid officers tracking scores and strategies. Since hospital reimbursement is linked to how happy patients are, we’ve suddenly gotten serious about satisfaction.

But behind the sterile questions on the HCAHPS survey, real stories about real people reside. I find myself often forgetting the flesh and blood that’s represented by each checked box, and am learning to realize that, while satisfaction is something to be striven for, dissatisfaction is something to be learned from.

In a series of posts, starting with this one, I’ll share stories of my own missteps—ones that may have caused my patients to answer never instead of always to questions about my care. The events described here helped me realize that, score or no score, responding to call bells actually matters at the human level:

Sarah […]

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