Is your hospital receiving low ratings? If so, it’s important for hospital executives and chief physicians to note the most common reasons for such negative feedback from patients.
Prior to my experience as an executive leadership coach, I worked for decades as a healthcare executive. During this time, I noticed 3 common troublespots for hospitals that breed low ratings and unhappy patients.
Here are 3 reasons why your hospital could be receiving low ratings.
Patients Don’t Feel Heard
When patients have questions about their ailment or treatment, it’s important to demonstrate empathy and attention with your body language so they know you genuinely care. This process is called active listening, and it is crucial for doctors and nurses to perfect if they are to provide the most effective and well-received patient experience.
Remember, these patients are coming to you because they are in need of help. Depending on their ailment, they might feel vulnerable, overwhelmed, angry, sad, fearful, or confused. It is imperative that all hospital staff use every interaction with their patients to convey their full support. You can do this through maintaining eye contact, nodding occasionally, refraining from multitasking, voicing occasional reassurance language like “mhmm” or “I hear you,” and using soft facial expressions while the patient is talking.
Low Emotional Intelligence From Hospital Staff
It’s very common for doctors and nurses to put their focus towards the treatment rather than on the patient him/herself. This results in low ratings and negative reviews from patients saying that they felt their doctors were dismissive, cold, distant, unavailable, and overall lacking the nurturing and comforting demeanor they needed to feel safe. While the hospital staff might just be trying to keep up in the fast-paced environment of the hospital, this behavior is usually received by the patient as being rude.
This is incredibly common for doctors and nurses because of the healthcare leadership gap. These healthcare providers spend years refining their technical skills and very little time learning how to lead their teams and patients in a way that makes them feel seen, heard, cared for, and prioritized. They don’t even realize how coldly they are coming off to patients until their hospitals receive low ratings or until management sits them down to have a stern talking-to.
The way to correct this behavior is practicing self awareness, one of the key steps in growing your emotional intelligence. By identifying the behaviors that can be perceived negatively by others and conversely, the behaviors that make patients feel valued, hospital staff members are more likely to build patient trust and loyalty, resulting in positive reviews.
Poor Patient-Provider Relationships
The #1 factor determining patient satisfaction is the relationship that patients have with their doctor.
Unfortunately, many doctors make the mistake of trying to see as many patients as possible in a day, even at the expense of forming lasting relationships with them. While this might make them more money in the present, they are shooting themselves in the foot in the long run. Without forming solid patient-provider relationships, doctors are more likely to receive low ratings, lose patients to other doctors who are more nurturing, and even get terminated from their practice.
Forming this connection is also the biggest contributor to patient loyalty. Think about it. If your office is booked solid with patients and some of them are asked to sit in the waiting room for an hour longer than they anticipated, who’s more likely to stay and return in the future without leaving a negative review: the patient who you have no real relationship with, or the patient you’ve known for years who trusts you and knows you personally?
Better Ratings Start With Better Leadership
Here are a few actions you can take to start improving your hospital’s ratings:
- Take my FREE leadership assessment to see how your leadership style and people management skills stack up against best practices.
- Learn more about my 6-session coaching package, designed to help you craft a vision for your business, achieve buy-in from your team, and execute the necessary goals to bring you towards success.
- Learn more about my 12-session coaching package, which features all the benefits of the 6-session package in addition to 6 weeks of emotional intelligence coaching to help you become an extraordinary leader.
About Dr. Wilkerson, PD, MBA, PCC.
Do you want to increase your impact? Do you want to increase profits under your leadership? Do you want to develop and use your abilities to the fullest to better connect with and lead others? Executive Leadership Coaching covers these bases. Dr. Jerrund Wilkerson, PD, MBA, PCC, has more than 30 years of successful executive leadership coaching in the United States and internationally.
As a licensed pharmacist, he is particularly passionate about helping develop effective leaders in the healthcare community. Dr. Wilkerson has coached and trained thousands of managers and leaders. He is a certified coach and member of the John Maxwell Leadership Team.
CLICK HERE to learn more.