Long-term care facilities play an important role in the lives of people who require assistance with their daily lives. It’s important to know that you are providing quality care to your patients. Collecting feedback from patients, family members and staff will help you continue to improve the lives of your residents.
In this blog post we discuss the importance of collecting feedback in long-term care residences to improve the overall quality of the patient experience.
Importance of Feedback
Communicate Effectively
By collecting feedback in long-term care residences, it gives both patients and their families a chance to communicate with staff about preferences, issues they may have experienced or positive moments. This gives staff the opportunity to engage with residents and their families. By constantly having open lines of communication with residents and their families, it helps to establish trust with staff. This trust leads to a more positive patient experience, and an improved reputation.
Improve the Experience
Collecting feedback enables long-term care management to get a good idea on how their facility runs on a daily bases. Patients and their families can help to identify issues that need to be addressed, like a leaky water fountain, a broken light fixture, or other facility issues noticed around the property. Feedback can also help to improve the quality of food served to residents, if you are noticing the patients are always complaining about the food when (for example) chicken gets served, then you know to review how the kitchen is cooking the chicken and if changes need to be made to the dish. By collecting feedback you can help address small issues, before they become larger problems, improving the lives of the patients.
Reputation Management
You can’t know what you don’t ask about, but just because you don’t know, doesn’t mean that other’s don’t. Word spreads fast, positive or negative, and word of mouth is how a facility’s reputation can either blossom or implode. By collecting feedback regularly from patients and their families, you are able to know what they think about your facility. It’s important to take action on this feedback as well, knowing you have a leaky faucet and actually getting fixed, are different things. By fixing the leaky facet it shows that you care about the patients’ quality of life. By showing you are listening and acting on the feedback provided by patients and their families, you show them that you care, and will improve the reputation of your facility in the community.
The Loop Experience Platform in Long-Term Care
The Loop Experience Platform collects, responds and analyzes the feedback collected from all areas of a long-term care facility. Every aspect of the Loop Experience Platform is built to improve the patient experience. From surveys to the shared inbox, we make collecting feedback simple! Loop also has an analytics tool that allows you to take a deep-dive into the data that you have collected, to help address the root cause of patient experiences. These insights can help improve workflow among team members and address reoccurring issues and resolve them before they start.
Collecting and utilizing feedback are increasingly important aspects of running a long-term care facility. Care providers should actively seek feedback from patients, family and staff members to help identify areas of improvement. This could include addressing concerns, enhancing communication, improving food service, and cleanliness. By listening to the feedback provided from residence, care providers can improve the overall quality of life for patients in long-term care facilities.
