Where is Nursing in the Patient Experience?

January 27, 2017

This question came to me as an “ah ha” moment as I was a member of a faculty doing a retreat for oncology nurses last summer.

Basically, when I started to talk about the patient experience and HCAHPS, the nurses’ eyes glazed over and they looked confused.

They knew little to nothing about the patient experience movement, what HCAHPS is or what it does. They didn’t know why their involvement in improving the patient experience is more than what they do every day, for each patient they care for.

This led me to ask more nurses what they knew and didn’t know about the patient experience movement and HCAHPS scores, and how they felt about them.

Nurses Are Not on the Sidelines of the Patient Experience

As I reflected on my 30 years of working with nurses, I realized that those of us in the patient experience movement have ignored the major source of information about patients — the nurses who directly care for them. And, we have further insulted the practice of nursing by thinking that nurses were somehow on the sidelines, that their role was anything but center to the patient experience.

So, when asked by the Beryl Institute last fall to be a guest blogger, I had the perfect topic.

I look at the foundational ethos of nursing practice, beginning with Florence Nightingale to nursing theorist and scholar Dr. Jean Watson (named a “Living Legend” by the American Academy of Nursing in 2013). Here’s where you can find my two posts on where nursing is in the patient experience:

“Patient Experience Sits at the Center of Nursing,” published October 21, 2016.

“The Patient Experience as the Ethos of Nursing,” published January 27, 2017.

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