Post 1: Patient Experience

Hello, and welcome to my blog! For my first post, I decided to take some time to reflect on the experience that I had the past couple of months at an inpatient rehabilitation hospital and what it taught me about healthcare management.

This summer, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to spend time at Fairlawn Rehabilitation Hospital in Worcester, MA as an intern. One of the many things that I was able to do while I was there was meet with each member of the senior leadership team and speak to him or her about what their job entails. When planning what to write for this blog post, I started trying to think of one thing that every administrator I spoke with had in common. I remembered one phrase that was said to me multiple times throughout the summer: “without the patients, we have nothing else.” This phrase quickly made me realize just how important patient experience is to every aspect of a hospital.

As I have been planning a career in healthcare administration, I didn’t think I would have a lot to do with the patients. I’m not going to be a nurse or a doctor, so how was I going to affect the patient? After this summer, I learned that everybody who is working in a hospital has an impact on the patient experience, whether they realize it or not. In order to be a healthcare manager, I think that it is important to always remind staff what they working for. In a healthcare organization, we are not dealing with widgets or gadgets; we are dealing with people’s lives. 

My main project this summer was to interact directly with the patients and talk to them about their experience at the hospital. I analyzed the results from their patient satisfaction survey and came up with topics to speak to patients about based on that. I would then report any issues or complaints that came up back to the Director of Human Resources, who would help me come up with a solution. By doing this, I learned why patient satisfaction was so important to every administrator in the organization. In order to stay in business, they need patients. In order to keep having patients, the hospital needs to make sure that they continue to provide excellent care and keep them satisfied throughout their stay. But it was also more than that, the administrators I spoke to had a genuine passion in making sure the patients were being taken care of the best as they could be, and that is the kind of administrator I hope to be one day. 

I was able to witness patients walking around the hallways who had been confined to their beds just two weeks before. It was amazing to see the work that hospitals do to help people and it motivated me even more to get involved in the healthcare field.  

Overall, the number one lesson I am taking away with me from my experience this summer is that without the patients, the money, staff, and fancy equipment mean nothing. I learned that as an administrator, it is important to always make patient experience a top priority.