Peer Feedbak to Improve Daily Nurse Leader Patient Rounding

Abstract

Improving the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) performance within the acute care setting is necessary to ensure high-quality care to patients served, maximized reimbursement, and enhanced market share (Al-Amin et al., 2018; Quigley et al., 2021). One approach for improving overall HCAHPS performance is elevating the patient’s perspective of the nurse leader visiting daily (Morton et al., 2014). The nurse managers within a 264-bed acute care facility in southern California consistently perform nurse leader patient rounding, yet the patient perception of the “nurse manager visited daily” shows significant variation. If the trend continues, the hospital will not achieve the target five star rating and is at risk of losing its four star rating, decreasing patient retention, and reducing the market share. Augmenting the approach for patient rounding was necessary. Peer feedback was the primary strategy utilized to augment nursing practice to mitigate the deficits in patients’ perception of the nurse leader visiting daily. Peer feedback is a proven strategy for enhancing practice effectiveness by expanding knowledge, skills, and behaviors (Haag-Heitman & George, 2011; Korkis et al., 2019). Implementing peer feedback required three phases to ensure practitioner uptake: education, paired leader rounding, and reflective learning. With the original plan, the manager rounding responsibility expanded to include nursing managers from the utilization review and the quality service lines. Changes to the executive leadership team resulted in adapting the originally agreed upon leader participants. A reduction in manager participants may have contributed to stalled patient satisfaction outcomes. With the transition of the Senior Vice President and Chief Nurse Executive, the rounding team reverted to the department-level nursing managers. While this represents a short-term setback, system-level goals have been established to extend patient rounding to the ancillary support and non-nursing managers. The nature of the mandate improves the proactive touchpoints with the patient to improve the experience from a system-level perspective instead of nursing alone. The implementation of this project supports the need to generate additional knowledge related to peer feedback as a practice standard among nursing managers and the role of leader rounding to improve overall patient satisfaction. Through developing a refined understanding, an optimized patient care experience is possible. Only through the spirit of inquiry, the rigor of generating new knowledge, and the timely implementation to practice will healthcare professionals realize optimal outcomes for the patients served.