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The Voice of the Customer
Our vision at the Jersey City Medical Center is to
achieve the top ten percentile in each of our four pillars:
patient safety, clinical quality, engagement (satisfaction), and
economic health. This year we completely revised and
renamed one of our four pillars from Satisfaction to
Engagement. Jersey City Medical Center has implemented
several new patient, physician and staff satisfaction initiatives
during the past four years. Driven by the principle that the
most effective method of understanding how we can
improve our patient, employee and physician satisfaction is
by listening carefully and engaging the people we serve.
These efforts have resulted in the hospital being named by
Modern Healthcare Magazine as one of the “top 100 places
to work nationally in healthcare”. In addition we obtained
the “Top Hospital” under 350 beds by Castle Connolly which
is rated by physicians throughout New Jersey for two
consecutive years. In 2011, the hospital was chosen by
consumers for the “Consumer Choice Award” by the
National Opinion Research Center in the Hudson County
area.
At Jersey City Medical Center we call our program of
listening “The Voice of the Customer”. The “Voice of the
Customer” represents the collective efforts our leadership
has instituted to increase customer satisfaction. At Jersey
City Medical Center our customers include our patients, their
families, the community, physicians, clergy and over 2,000
employees.
During the last three years, hourly rounding on the
nursing units has become an important avenue to involve
multi-disciplinary team members in planning our patient’s
care, identifying patient specific needs increasing our
patients’ involvement in their care, assessing pain, managing
safety concerns and addressing basic satisfaction issues.
Service recovery is vital and employees can now access
information on the LibertyHealth Jersey City Medical Center
intranet. The intranet provides service recovery scripts
which provide step-by-step instructions for patient
encounters. Senior Management also conducts evening
and night rounds and random patient rounding, thus
providing another tool in hearing directly from staff, families
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and patients about our strengths and areas in which we did
not meet all of their expectations. The hospital has
instituted an electronic suggestion box and also developed a
President’s Council composed of members of many career
paths, including nursing. Due to our combined efforts,
Jersey City Medical Center has dramatically increased
physician satisfaction, nurse satisfaction and overall staff
satisfaction from 2008 to 2011. Leadership also values the
feedback from all our employees and seeks ideas and
suggestions from the annual employee surveys and physician
surveys. We continue to seek guidance from Press Ganey to
increase our patient satisfaction and learn how to re-commit
ourselves to becoming a leader in healthcare satisfaction.
Our Chief Nursing Officer, Rita Smith, RN, DNP, along
with the Chief Medial Officer Ken Garay, MD and our
President/CEO Joe Scott, FACHE, host a monthly “Breakfast
or Lunch at the Brownstone” (a local restaurant) with our
attending physicians to hear their ideas and concerns related
to patient care and discuss the physician’s role in patient
satisfaction.
Jersey City Medical Center holds an annual community
meeting each November. This meeting is a special time for
the public to address the hospital Board of Trustees and
Administration with concerns, comments and questions.
Following a brief introduction, a slide show illustrates our
programs and objectives. Most important is the dialogue
period between community members, community leaders,
former patients and the hospital leadership. This is a forum
for our leadership to listen to the voice of our customers, the
members of our community.
We also conduct health fairs, safety and trauma
prevention events, and a monthly community program called
“Dinner with the Doctor”. This year we are sending direct
mail surveys to selected individuals in Jersey City and
surrounding towns. As we continue to listen and respond to
the “Voice of the Customer” we will continue to adapt our
practices as we become one of the nation’s premier hospitals
for patient, employee, community and physician
engagement/satisfaction. We are well underway!