Although patient and family experience initiatives have long been a focus of providers across the continuum, increasing transparency in the news and through CMS compare data puts post-acute providers under more pressure than ever to succeed. That’s why this year, we’ve chosen to focus part of our national meeting research on improving the patient and family experience in post-acute care.

Post-acute providers face unique barriers to improving the experience, including managing patient and family needs over long lengths of stay and with limited staff capacity. Luckily, hospitals have been focused on similar challenges for a long time, and much of their work can be applied in post-acute settings. We’ve chosen to highlight a few of these strategies from our colleagues in the Nursing Executive Center below.

Challenge #1: Making patients feel at home over extended lengths of stay

Solution: Workflow modification starter list

Because their average length of stay is upwards of two weeks, many patients view their stay in post-acute care as a residential experience. As a result, any disruptions to patients’ daily routine can be a major source of dissatisfaction.

Making small changes to your staff’s everyday workflow can go a long way in minimizing these disruptions and making patients feel more at home. For example, instead of waking patients up to take their medications at noon and midnight, identify medications that patients can take upon rising, or shift the medication schedule to times when patients are typically awake—such as 8:00 AM and 8:00 PM.

Get started by accessing our list of common disruptions to patient rest and routine that can be resolved by simple modifications. Then, use our identification exercise to detect avoidable disruptions at your organization.

Access the list

Access the disruption identification exercise

Challenge #2: Building relationships with patients and caregivers

Solution: Patient personalization posters

Many post-acute providers aim to make patients feel more comfortable throughout their stay by identifying patient-specific care preferences and lifestyle choices. Tracking this information helps providers treat patients as individuals and build vital relationships with them and their families. However, the idea of having all the staff who manage a patient identify and retain this information can be daunting—especially considering frontline staffs’ many other responsibilities.

Patient personalization posters are a low-resource way to help different members of the care team learn patient preferences and identify small ways to make the patient and her family feel more comfortable. These posters typically provide information on the patient’s preferred name, primary caregivers, and hobbies or interests. Use one of our templates to let each patient and family display their desired level of personal information and care preferences to staff.

Access the templates

Challenge #3: Meeting urgent patient and family needs with limited staff capacity

Solution: Family-Initiated Rapid Response Team

Staff in post-acute settings often have competing priorities that make responding to everyday patient and family requests challenging. Given these staffing constraints, it’s important for organizations to develop a way to help patients and families feel comfortable in scenarios when staff aren’t nearby. Without it, urgent needs can go unidentified and patients and families can feel unsupported.

Implementing a family-initiated rapid response team can help staff identify and respond to quality and experience concerns more efficiently. A family-initiated rapid response team is a dedicated hotline, typically operated by a nurse or aide, that patients and families can call if they have unmet needs. The operator is trained to assess if the patient situation is urgent and send out a response team if necessary. If the call is not urgent, a staff representative still visits within the next 24-hours to ensure any outstanding concerns are addressed.

Use our example resources from experienced organizations to learn how to develop, train staff for, and introduce a family-initiated rapid response team.

Access the resources