Treat Me With Respect

At Nationwide Children’s, we strive to deliver excellent service.

It’s all about ensuring best outcomes in our interactions with you. By focusing on providing patient and family centered care, we strive to provide collaboration with you that ensures respect and dignity, unbiased information sharing, and your participation in everything we do.

What Does Service Excellence Look Like?

  • Everyday staff at all levels of the organization deliver excellent service.
  • Staff smiling at patients and families when appropriate.
  • Staff walking a lost family to their appointment.
  • Staff being attentive to a family’s needs in the cafeteria and in the clinic.
  • Staff asking about patient and family preferences before administering care.
  • Staff taking the time to answer questions.
  • Staff working to resolve concerns the minute they are shared.

“When you see a family who could use some help, don’t hesitate to approach them. You don’t have to have all the answers – you only need to help them get their answer," says Chief Nursing Officer Linda Stoverock.

One of the most important areas we’re working on is improving communication, between families and providers, and between different providers, to improve outcomes as well as patient and family experiences.

How Are We Doing?

We use patient satisfaction surveys to tell us how you feel about the care and service you received.

This first chart tells us how you rate our hospital on a score of 0-10. We measure what percent of patients/families give us a score of 9 or 10.

Twelve of the questions on our patient satisfaction survey ask if our doctors and nurses are communicating well with patients and their families. This second chart shows what percent of the answers to these questions say that we “always” communicate well.

Child HCAHPS Inpatient Survey 4-Domain Communication Top-Box Percentage RN/MD Communication to Pt & Family Child HCAHPS Inpatient Survery Overall Hospital Stay Rating Top Box %; 9 and 10 Scores

How Do I Read This Chart?

We report our data using what is known as a control chart. There are four elements on the chart. 1) The blue diamonds: these are the actual data points for each month. They depict the event rate as defined on the vertical axis. 2) and 3): The dotted red lines: these are the upper and lower control limits. They are scientifically calculated to represent the statistical range within which normal random variation occurs in a stable system. 4) The solid red line. This is the average of the blue diamonds for that time frame. As long as the blue diamonds are within the dotted red lines, the system being measured is a stable one. There are certain patterns of blue diamond configuration (e.g. diamonds outside the control limits), that mean something in the system has changed. This is called special cause variation and will usually involve a deeper investigation as to why the new pattern of variation. Each control chart contains an arrow which indicates the desired change direction. For most harm events, the desired direction is down (i.e. less harm is better). For other measures (compliance rates, days between harm events) the desired direction is up.

Continuing to Improve Our Service

Our efforts around Treat Me With Respect empower every staff member to be problem solvers. To do this, we focus on the same tools we use every day to deliver high quality, safe care – our Zero Hero tools. Each staff member is responsible and accountable to live Nationwide Children’s mission, carry out our values, mentor others and use the Zero Hero tools.