About $200 billion is being poured into hospital reconstruction and renovation projects in the U.S., but the question is whether it’s actually improving patient satisfaction. A new study conducted by Johns Hopkins found that it’s not making much of a difference.
The researchers surveyed a total of 5,663 patients at an academic tertiary care hospital. They analyzed patient satisfaction survey results both 7.5 months post-move and 12 months pre-move. The data was then placed into facility-related, non-facility-related or overall satisfaction categories.
The patients reported that the hospital setting was more pleasing but there was no significant improvement in how they viewed the quality of care they received from the physicians and nurses.
"This means that patients are able to distinguish the quality of care they get from doctors, nurses, housekeeping and other support services from the look and feel of where they are receiving the care," Dr. Zishan Siddiqui, assistant professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said in a statement. Previously, it was thought that patients could not distinguish between the quality and look and feel of the care.
Siddiqui believes that hospital leaders have to stop blaming aging buildings for low patient satisfaction scores and start addressing the real problem, which is improving the quality of care the physicians and nurses deliver.
Two other studies investigated this but found that hospital remodeling improves patient satisfaction scores. But Siddiqui explained that those studies had limitations.
One of the studies had a small group of participants that were self-selected because they paid for the appealing rooms. The other study looked at a maternity unit, which is a much different patient population than an academic tertiary care hospital population.
The researchers suggested that more research is needed analyzing satisfaction results from hospitals that have satisfied patient safety and provider satisfaction initiatives. Instead of focusing on renovation projects, those hospitals developed features to improve their safety, work flow, efficiency, productivity and stress.
