Cultivating Culture Change: Housekeepers Increase Positive Patient Experiences

About the Program

Category: Human Services (Best in Category)

Year: 2023

It is well documented that a positive patient experience during hospitalization is closely linked to high employee engagement and quality of care. Consequently, patients’ perceptions of their hospital experience depend on a large extent to the quality of interactions with hospital workers. The added challenge of COVID-19 and how it has heightened awareness and perceptions of hygiene and increased anxiety over the cleanliness of the environment directly impacts the overall hospital experience. Olive View-UCLA Medical Center (OVMC) partnered with Sodexo, the contracted company for our environmental services to improve the quality of patient interactions with our Housekeeping Staff (HS) by increasing patient engagement through courteous communication and behavior. Creative strategies were employed to increase HS involvement based on qualitative and quantitative data results. Interventions over a 12 month period included weekly huddles, ad hoc meetings, visual boards, conducting real time and in-person proprietary 5-item questionnaires (Experiencia), patient and staff interviews, focus groups, educational inservices and interactive debriefing sessions. This inter and intra-departmental collaborative effort effectively increased our Press-Ganey (PG) scores with a quarterly average of 25% in improvement of scores from January 2022 thru December 2022, with the highest improvement by 142% in the first quarter of implementation.