“The price of success is hard work, dedication to job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand.”

Vince Lombardi

As a clinician often, the measure of success is solely determined by how a clinician can perform tasks. This is illustrated in the fact that emergency department nurses often determine good nurses versus bad nurses based on IV insertion skills. Is this the correct way to measure success or is this a very nearsighted approach to what we deem “quality” nursing care?

How does a patient measure success in the hospital? Do they expect clinical competence? Yes they do… Do they expect doctors and nurses will work together? Yes they do… What do they hope for?

Patients hope that they get a clinician that is going to CARE for them!  Boy oh boy what a difference. What does this mean or clinicians and how can we better quantify caring on the patient’s perspective?

One thing it means is when we are clinically competent we get ZERO credit! People expect clinical competence.  Think about that for a minute…

What do we do? How do we quantify caring?

Pathway to success:

1. Be visible to your patients.  This means getting into the room every hour and talking to the people.
2. Get to know your patient. I’m not advocating for every nurse to give every single patient a back rub but what I am advocating for is to dive a little deeper into communication with your patient to connect with them on a very personal level. That connection is the foundation for our patients to quantify caring. It is because you are actually taking time to get to know them!
3. Keep patients in the loop. When you talk to your patients let them know what’s going on. There is nothing more scary than the unknown. People will make up their own ideas about why you’re not talking to them. People even go so far as to think they are dying because nobody will communicate.

We as healthcare providers must begin to move beyond clinical competence and follow the same path as other industries and actually communicate with the patient.