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Like customer satisfaction, patient satisfaction and overall happiness should be important aspects of any wound care clinic or medical facility. Patient reviews are a great way to ascertain the overall happiness of the patients that visit your facility but need to be implemented properly.

Here are some tips on how to improve wound care patient satisfaction, and how to translate this satisfaction into positive reviews.

Why Patient Satisfaction Matters

Often, patients who go to wound care facilities are in pain or have experienced painful and traumatic situations either very recently or sometime in their past. Going to a wound care facility that cares about their needs not only guarantees that they will come back and finish their much-needed treatment, it also elevates their mental health and overall well-being improves.

4 Tips To Improve Patient Satisfaction

1. Positivity

   Patients who are greeted with a smile from a receptionist, nurse, or doctor are likely to have a more enjoyable experience.

2. Be On Time

   The longer patients wait, the less satisfied they become. Although most people will understand if the doctor runs a little late, patients who are forced to wait for a long time are more likely to report negative experiences. If a doctor is running late, inform the patient waiting in line so they aren’t left wondering what is going on.

3. Empathize and Empower

   The patients who come to your wound care facility have likely experienced a difficult injury or traumatic event. Let them talk about it if they need to and empower them by encouraging self-reflection. Giving patients autonomy or the ability to make decisions, (shared decision making and patient participation) also increases feelings of empowerment and in turn, improves health.

4. Follow-Up

   Checking in with patients after they’ve left your office not only shows a genuine concern for their health and well-being, it also provides them with the opportunity to ask questions about their recovery process.

The Importance of Reviews

Today, patients check clinic reviews in the same way customers check restaurant reviews. If multiple options are available, potential patients are likely to choose the wound care facility that is the best rated. While ratings aren’t the end-all, be-all for hospitals like they are in the hospitality industry, striving for good ratings and reviews should be a part of any facility’s patient care model.

As with anything, there are pros and cons to asking patients to review wound care services.

• Pros
  Too often patients will only leave a review if they’ve had a negative experience and want to warn other people. By asking patients to fill -n satisfaction reviews, wound care facilities encourage better reviews. You may be the best clinic in an entire state, but if you only have one review that happens to be negative potential patients will avoid your facility.
• Cons
  Emphasizing the need for patients to fill out forms and review clinics can put extra stress on to doctors and clinicians. It’s important for management in wound care facilities to ensure that doctors and nurses do not feel pressured into being perfect to garner good reviews. Bedside manner and patient satisfaction are important, and doctors who are focused entirely on ratings cannot do their jobs effectively. Medical treatment should not be altered for the sake of reviews.

Trends in Patient Satisfaction Reviews Reveal Clinic Shortfalls

Once you have enough data on patient satisfaction, feedback from at least 30 patients is recommended. You’ll likely be able to spot small issues before they become big problems that severely impact patient care and happiness.

For example, if a specialized wound care physician comes to visit patients every Thursday and patient satisfaction dips around the same time, it’s possible to pinpoint the issue and resolve it. Perhaps the physician has a poor bedside manner and it’s impacting patient happiness to the point that the entire practice is rated negatively.

The Good, the Bad, and the Bias

Patient reviews should reveal both positive and negative opinions because every patient should be asked to submit a patient satisfaction form. If it is clear that a patient has had a poor experience, they should still be asked to review the practice at the end of their visit. Asking only patients that have had positive experiences to create a review creates a bias that can potentially misrepresent the facility.

Of course, negative responses should not be viewed as negative. They should be viewed as room for change and growth. Sometimes patients are not comfortable telling their wound care physician upfront what their issues were, but are perfectly happy to comment anonymously. This is one of the reasons patient review forms are so handy. And sometimes, offering patients the ability to speak out without judgment is all they need.

Overall, specialized wound care facilities are encouraged to focus on patient satisfaction and the overall happiness of wound care patients. Because at the end of the day, happy and healthy patients are the primary concern.