St. Francis Hospice takes home satisfaction award

Branch Manager Jodi Loucks with the award presented to St. Francis Hospice.

Strategic Healthcare Programs (SHP) presented St. Francis Hospice with an award for overall patient satisfaction.

SHP is a national organization that tracks records of hospices across the country and gives each a satisfaction rating based on responses from patients. SHP awarded St. Francis for ranking in the top 20 percent of overall patient satisfaction, scoring above average in every one of SHP’s hospice satisfaction quality measures.

St. Francis Hospice Branch Manager Jodi Loucks said patient satisfaction is gauged by sending a survey to the bereaved a few months after the patient’s passing and by requesting constant feedback from the patient and their family. She said the survey features an extensive amount of questions that will result in a score of 0 to 10. The award won by St. Francis requires hospices to average a nine out of 10 score on these surveys.

“We always strive to get a 10, and to this point we are still at 100 percent on the year, so we are very excited about that,” Loucks said. “It asks lots of different things as far as spiritual, the bereavement process, were we asking about medication, did we show-up timely, just a huge array of questions to gauge patient satisfaction.”

Patient satisfaction is a high priority of any health service organization. Loucks said there are two major things that designates St. Francis Hospice as an organization that succeeds at patient satisfaction instead of just caring about it.

“For one, we are a local hospice with local workers,” Loucks said. “So, the staff is all from here; they want to care for their community. We are truly invested in this community and the people that we serve. So when you have that connection it’s just automatically going to (be) better than if it was somebody you didn’t know from an hour away.”

She said keeping a familiar face around the patient is also crucial.

“You will have the same one or two nurses as your primary nurse the entire time you are in our care,” Loucks said. “We get to build that relationship with not only the patient, but the family. So, we know your history, we know how they’ve tolerated certain procedures or medications and their wishes and beliefs, too.”

Loucks said she and the department are extremely proud to receive the recognition, because to them patient satisfaction is everything.

“If the patient and family aren’t satisfied, we aren’t doing our job,” Loucks said. “What I tell our patients, and write in each of their packets, that if they cannot rate us a 10 every day, we want to know about it right away. I, and my staff, want to do everything we can to be exceptional. This is the hardest time that anyone will go through, and not only for the patient, but the family as well. So they deserve exceptional care and I want to know right away so we can fix that.”