Linking Employee Satisfaction With Patient Satisfaction and Safety

We recently released a white paper that examines the role that effective talent management practices and systems can play in supporting patient satisfaction and safety in the healthcare industry. This link between employee satisfaction and patient satisfaction and safety is something we’ve heard about anecdotally from our healthcare customers for years, and is increasingly being recognized and understood within the industry. For example, The Georgia Quality Institute has found that long term care facilities with happy employees record fewer patient falls and fewer residents with acquired pressure ulcers and acquired catheters.

This is hardly a coincidence! I wanted to share with you just some of the reasons the link between happy employees and higher levels of patient satisfaction is so strong.

Research on healthcare employees indicates there are five key drivers of employee satisfaction, especially among nurses. They include:
1. Management shows they care about employees
2. Management listens to employees
3. Employees receive help with job stress
4. Employees perceive evaluations to be fair
5. Employees feel their work makes a difference to the organization and patients

The challenge is for healthcare organizations to address each of these drivers and ensure employees are able to focus on their core job functions – caring for patients. Over the next week or two, I’m going to look at how leading healthcare organizations across North America are using talent management as one of their strategies for meeting these challenges head-on.

In my next post, I’ll look at how talent management practices can be used to show that management cares for and listens to employees.