You have been appointed to chair a hospital-wide committee to develop and implement a plan to improve patient satisfaction in your facility. Your Chief Nursing Officer has provided you a summary report indicating a steady decline in patient satisfaction over the previous six months. You will need to identify the various resources available for tracking patient satisfaction, establish a clear bench mark and design a specific plan of action for reversing this trend. It is essential to note in your development that research has shown nurse communication and hourly rounding to be key drivers in patient satisfaction metric improvements. These points should be a focus of your change initiative.
Roger's Change Theory
The diffusion of innovation theory, or Roger's change theory, was first proposed by Everett Rogers more have a half a century ago. Despite the theories age, it remains relevant to any change process today. The premise of this theory is that different groups of people adapt to changes at different paces. Some people are entirely coping with changes as soon as they are presented with it in things such as new ideas, new technologies, new processes, or anything else that represent an innovation of sorts. Therefore, Roger claimed that any innovation has a natural process of diffusing through these different types of personalities as was predictable to a greater of lesser extent (Kaminiski, 2011).
Figure 1 - Adoption of Innovation (Kaminiski, 2011)
SWOT
Strengths
• New Technology Tools
• Evidence-based Practices
• Multiple Change Models
Weaknesses
• Current Levels of Dissatisfaction
• Change Model Selection Pressures
• Inappropriate or Non-existent Metrics
Opportunities
• Develop New Metrics
• Implement a Successful Change Strategy
• Improve Patient Satisfaction
Threats
• Choosing the Wrong Model
• Resistance to Change
• Wasted Resources
Action Plan
Borrowing from Roger's theories, it is unlikely that all members of the organization will adopt any new process or technology all at the same time. That is, the organizational members will likely respond to the changes at their own pace; some will quickly accept the change, while others will resist the change on many levels. However, knowing this information beforehand helps the planning process and lets the management know what to expect about the entire change management implementation. For example, knowing that employees will respond to change differently in advance will allow management in various ways. Management can praise the innovators and early adapters, and actually use these individuals to help the other members of the organization more readily advance through the various stages.
Any planned change an organization involves the process that enables a company to take control over the implementation of improvement mechanisms that can led to certain objectives. In this case, the objectives entail that the organization make broad sweeping changes so that the entire organization can make an improvement in patient satisfaction. Such improvements can often be difficult and many such projects regularly fail. The change entails the transition of individuals, teams and organizations from a present state of operations in which they have likely grown acquainted with, to transition to new methods, measures, and operational processes.
The first steps will be the planning phase in which a Communication Plan
Effective communication is likely one of the most important aspect of the entire plan as well as one of the critical success factors in any healthcare organization; but it is especially critical in adopting to new systems and processes. Communication must be successfully garnered throughout the organization at all times. For example, the supervisor must be open to receive information transfer between employees and management so that everyone is aware of the advancements in the project's status as well as how the team is reaching progress towards the metrics that have been identified. Studies have even indicated that there is a strong correlation between nurses, communication competence, self-efficacy, and job satisfaction and it is recommended that training programs that are customized to individual characteristics such as self-efficacy and job satisfaction to improve the communicative competence of nurses (Park, Jeoung, & Sok, 2015).
Leadership Styles
There have been many studies that have tried to understand the relationship between organizational behavior and different leadership styles. Since the research has identified that people will accept change at different styles; This study examines the relationship of emotional intelligence (EI) with transformational leadership (TL) and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) of the followers using a sample of 57 dyads of managers and their supervisors (i.e., 114 respondents) participated in this study (Modassir & Singh, 2008). Transformational leadership is one of the most popular leadership model and it has been argued that the transformational leadership model is dependent factors that are closely related to the components that are commonly defined within this model and their similarity to those defined within emotional intelligence and the organizational citizenship model. That is, if a transformational leaders have sufficient emotional intelligence and are…
