Magee Rehabilitation Builds a Better Patient Experience Through Continuous Learning

Magee Rehabilitation Hospital’s investment in professional development yielded significant patient satisfaction improvements and elevated its vision to provide the highest-quality care to patients.

Magee Rehabilitation Hospital, a member of Jefferson Health, consistently ranked as one of the leading rehabilitation hospitals in the country but struggled with patient satisfaction despite its high-quality programming and recently renovated facility. Specifically, patients identified courtesy, taking time to listen, and preparation for and explanation of care as areas needing improvement. Similarly, leaders identified a need to decrease patient anxiety and reduce falls and medication errors.

Leaders understood that achieving their patient care goals would require an investment in the nursing teams charged with providing most of the front-line care at Magee. Their teams would have to be trained with new and different skills tailored to support the organization’s patient experience aspirations.

With a large, diverse and busy staff to train, Magee Rehabilitation Hospital sought an agile platform that could align nursing teams to the level of care expected at Magee while providing the right training at the right time via the right delivery mode.

Together, Magee and Huron developed and launched a learning program focused on the organization’s goals for a more consistent, quality patient experience. The team aligned curriculum around a new framework for patient communication and trained employees on the skills needed to advance their patient experience goals.

Magee and Huron developed an employee learning program that focused on the following:

• Establish a culture of learning: Magee realized that continuous learning could be a differentiator for the organization and critical to driving organizational goals. All Magee nursing staff — from nurse leaders through front-line nurses — were engaged in developing new skills aligned to the organization’s goals. In addition to the continuous professional development for current nursing staff, leaders prioritized the same training for onboarding employees. Training was also provided to individuals who deviated from standard practice.

It was important to make learning agile, accessible and impactful by adopting multiple modes of delivery ranging from self-paced online learning to in-person small group settings. Continuous learning designed to advance professional development and reinforce organizational goals replaced typical one-off trainings on a single topic or initiative.

• Standardize patient communication: By implementing a standardized communication framework, nurse leaders were equipped with new tools to better engage patients. The framework provided a way for nurses to keep patients informed and for patients to voice their needs or concerns to caregivers consistently across every encounter. With this training, Magee was able to ease patient anxiety and boost patient satisfaction scores.
• Improve patient experience of care: With the implementation of hourly rounding, nurses were able to increase transparency with patients regarding their plans of care, timing of medication and general comfort. The efficiency of hourly rounding also enabled nurses to proactively address patients’ needs, saving time and improving patient satisfaction.

Nursing staff trained on and began utilizing bedside shift reports, which helped inform patients about their daily plan of care and facilitated better communication between nurses. Ensuring an efficient and safe handoff between nurses is critical to support patient safety and reduce medical issues such as patient falls. New nursing behaviors like a bedside shift report helped engage patients in their care and allowed patients to see caregivers working effectively as a team, all of which contributes positively to the overall patient experience of care.

• Ensure excellence with skill validation: Magee and Huron understood the challenge leaders and teams often face when translating new skills from the training room into practice at the bedside.

Developing and adopting employee skill validation helped ensure new behaviors were adopted correctly and consistently, a critical element to sustaining the desired outcomes, such as patient experiences improvements. By leveraging their training platform, Magee and Huron created a skill validation team to reinforce and reward desired behaviors, increasing the effectiveness of new tactics and helping establish new behaviors as part of the organization’s overall culture.

Magee Rehabilitation Hospital, a member of Jefferson Health, is an 83-bed acute rehabilitation hospital located in Center City Philadelphia. In addition to its inpatient hospital, Magee also operates four outpatient centers in the region and has a day rehab program that crosses the bridge between inpatient and outpatient care.