A hospital visit is almost always a stressful endeavor. Yes, the birth of a child is a wonderful thing, truly, but even the miracle of birth can provoke excessive anxiety in the heat of the moment.
In a nutshell, anxiety comes from not knowing. When the future is told and a situation begins to unravel, that anxiety melts away and we are left wondering why we got so worked up in the first place. A classic high-anxiety moment in a hospital stems from a simple misunderstanding in the heat of the ordeal.
Let’s say that Mike is going in for surgery. Mike’s family is in the waiting room and they’re told the surgery will take 30 minutes. The nurse wheels Mike back to get started but the OR needs to be readied and that’s going to take around 45 minutes. After an hour the surgery starts, but Mike’s family was told this would only take 30 minutes, so they begin to worry why the surgery is taking twice as long now because their internal clock is now at an hour. They start to panic. They assume bad outcomes. When in reality, Mike’s surgery is going well.
This situation is very common. It’s also, very avoidable, with good communication. High-stress conundrums like this often affect the staff negatively. It might also lead to bad reviews and poor CAHPS measures which will directly impact the provider organization financially. All in all, this can start a bad momentum trajectory that could take some time to re-route. Workplace culture is a difficult thing to perfect, let alone workplace culture in a place such as a hospital or ASC where there are so many moving parts and long hour shifts. We at Familyfirst get it. We understand it can be a tricky thing to navigate which is why we’re so committed to building a better future for healthcare providers to enhance the patient’s family experience.
Familyfirst has built technology to deal with this exact problem with a thoughtful humanistic solution. By allowing care providers to connect with a patient’s family through a HIPAA-compliant messaging app that’s easy to navigate, we have seen higher satisfaction rates and reduced stress in patient’s families. We’re building out a new suite of “stress management tools” to further empower the patient’s family to take stress into their own hands. Tools like our “Good News Feed” and “Breathwork” encourage a patient’s family to reclaim their emotions during a hospital visit.
Again, hospital visits will rarely be without a worry, but that does not mean we should accept the status quo for patients and the family’s of patients. Time after time again, we have seen that good communication can alleviate a lot of the woes present when a person enters a healthcare facility.
