Will educating staff regarding the importance of regular patient rounding increase staff knowledge of patient rounding in the emergency department?

Abstract

Today's health care is facing tough challenges. More and more physicians are exiting primary care. Patients, left without primary care physicians, are inundating emergency rooms for their health care concerns. The ripple effect of this is overcrowded emergency department waiting rooms, increased wait times for initial medical screenings, decreased patient perception of quality of care, decreased patient satisfaction, increased incidences of patients leaving the ED without seeing a provider, and decreased revenue for the emergency department. Patient rounding in the ED can be a solution to these problems. Patient rounding has been shown to increase communication between the ED staff and patients regarding wait times and plans of care. In addition, rounding is reported to increase patient satisfaction, increase patient safety, increase patient perception of quality of care, and increase revenue for the hospital. Educating the ED staff as to the importance of patient rounding is a key factor to enable staff to perform patient rounding. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship of educating ED staff, regarding the importance of patient rounding, with increasing staff knowledge of patient rounding. An educational project utilizing an educational PowerPoint® in addition to a Likert style, pretest posttest questionnaire was implemented with participants. The participants' scores on the pretest-posttest were then statistically analyzed. The results of the pretest-posttest questionnaire showed that the educational PowerPoint® did indeed increase the ED staff knowledge as to the importance of regular patient rounding in the emergency department.