Compassionate care is a practice that fosters empathy, understanding, and deeper nurse-patient relationships in order to deliver a higher quality of care. It is a way for staff to become more familiar with the reasons for their patients' individual pain and suffering so that they can more accurately address them.
And in an age where patient satisfaction matters so much, compassionate care has quickly become an essential skill for all nursing staff. Here we'll go over why compassionate care in nursing matters, challenges to overcome, and ways leadership can promote it within staff.
Why Compassionate Care in Nursing Matters
To a patient, a hospital stay is often fraught with anxiety, depression, and other intense emotions; for a nurse, it's just another day on the job. This disconnect can leave a patient feeling unheard, unseen, or belittled if nurses are not consciously making an effort otherwise. This is why compassionate care in nursing is so important. It comforts patients, diminishes feelings of anxiety, and can even strengthen their will to survive whatever they are going through. This is especially true for patients who may not have a support network of friends and family to turn to when they're experiencing health issues. The emotional support that nurses offer is invaluable to decrease a patient's stress levels which, in turn, affects their recovery time.
Additionally, compassionate care winds up benefiting nursing staff as well as the larger organization. When patient outcomes are improved, patient satisfaction increases, it instills confidence in staff which thus improves morale, and can even make tough situations easier to cope with while at work.
However, this is easier said than done. You may be thinking, "how can our nurses give so much attention to individual patients when they're already spread so thin?" And you'd be right. So let's examine some of the challenges that come with implementing compassionate care in nursing and how you can overcome them.
Challenges to Compassionate Care in Nursing
High Patient-to-Nurse Ratios
Regardless of where your facility is located, chances are you've felt the effects of the healthcare staffing shortages. And this is a major concern not only for your organization's bottom line, but also the quality of care that you can offer. Studies have repeatedly shown that staffing saves lives — a 2002 study concluded that "In hospitals with high patient-to-nurse ratios, surgical patients experience higher risk-adjusted 30-day mortality and failure-to-rescue rates, and nurses are more likely to experience burnout and job dissatisfaction" and that the odds of a patient death increase 7% for each additional patient the nurse takes on at a time.
More recently, a study of New York hospitals during the pandemic concluded that there would have been 4,370 fewer in-hospital deaths in a two-year period among Medicare patients if they had safer staffing.
Administrative and Financial Pressures
Cost-saving measures have been the name of the game for a while in healthcare settings. However, how these measures are implemented can be problematic. Many executives' first cost-cutting instinct is to have layoffs in order to save money in the short-term. But this strategy often comes back to bite them in the long-run. Here's why:
- Turnover contagion: When staff is spread too thin, they become burnt out and wind up leaving. And turnover is extremely expensive. In fact, the average cost of replacing an RN is just north of $52,000.
- Decreased quality of care: When turnover contagion takes hold, it not only bleeds the bottom line, it leads to poorer quality of care and even reputational damage. It breaks the trust between patient and hospital that's so essential in delivering care.
- Tangential costs increase: If quality care decreases, then other costs increase. If an ICU is understaffed, for instance, errors can be made and safety protocol is more likely to be overlooked. In turn, the risk of infections increases which can lead to injury and death, thus costing the hospital a significant amount of money.
Layoffs and other such cost-cutting measures simply make it infeasible for nurses to give the same amount of attention to every patient, decreasing the likelihood that they are able to practice compassionate care methods.
Strategies to Promote Compassionate Care
The importance of compassionate care really can't be understated. And while the above issues are often valid, they can be overcome.
Cut Staffing Costs Without Sacrificing Nurses
These days there are so many ways to cut staffing costs without actually sacrificing standard of care. If you're like most hospitals, chances are that you rely on contingent staff in some capacity. Here are some ways you can address those costs:
- Managed Service Program (MSP): An MSP is capable of managing contracts, onboarding, interviewing and screening, and more. This allows you to tap into a larger talent pool without having to do the leg work yourself.
- Vendor Management System (VMS): A VMS is a talent management platform that standardizes your contingent worker management across the entire organization. Whether local or travel, contract or per diem, clinical or non-clinical, you can gain more visibility into your staffing operations and improve overall quality of staff.
- Internal Agency: Stop scouring your city for talent and set up a streamlined pipeline directly to your organization by creating your own internal agency. HWL's internal agency offering, for instance, has helped organizations big and small implement this model for both immediate and future cost savings.
Supportive Leadership Environment
Culture starts at the top and trickles down to the rest of the organization. If leadership actively advocates for compassionate care, and treats their own staff with respect and empathy, it becomes infectious in the best way possible. After all, a nurse's personal well-being is linked to the quality of care that they provide. So if they feel valued at work, they are more likely to exhibit those same values to their patients.
Additionally, leadership calls the shots when it comes to implementing policies, education, and training. Formal training for compassionate care should consider:
- Why it's important for nurses to understand what their patients are going through and their needs
- Nurses may be the only person that patient can talk to, which can become someone to lean on when experiencing anxiety
- The importance of active listening with patients to pick up on body language
- How often nurses should follow up with their patients so they feel valued and cared for
- How to quell concerns to regulate their stress levels
- Answering any and all questions thoroughly that they patients have
HWL Works to See You Succeed
Compassionate care in nursing is hard to practice when staff is spread so thin. That's why HWL's suite of workforce solutions are designed to cut costs, improve the quality of your staffing options, and maintain standards of care all at the same time.
When your staff suffers, so too do your patients, so find out how we can improve your operations by getting in touch today!