Experience Matters
Good morning.
Before I get to today’s topic, I’d like to put out a call for new year’s resolutions. What do you hope to accomplish this year? How do you want to better yourself? What would you like to see happen here at UMMC or in your personal life in 2024? Send your resolutions to the VC Notes inbox and I may share some of your responses in an upcoming VC Notes. I look forward to reading your comments.
Now, on to today’s column.
I started the 2024 edition of VC Notes last week sharing great news of the state’s largest organ swap. Today, I want to keep the positive vibes going with some emails I’ve received from people who had a patient/family experience with us.
These emails include key words and phrases that highlight the effort, thought and consideration that each patient or family member observed or experienced from their care team. You’ll read things like “gratitude,” “never been treated with such care,” “second to none,” “became our extended family,” “nicest and most caring and encouraging staff” and “everyone shared a common goal.” Powerful, meaningful stuff.
Recollections of a positive patient experience like these are gold stars of which we should all be proud. No one person created such a supportive environment. It took a team, which often includes people who the patient or family member never meet. To trigger feedback like this truly takes a village. Being a patient isn’t really that fun. We can agree on that. I can personally attest to this as I was a patient in our hospital recently, and even though everything went great and everyone was amazing, there’s still a long list of things I would have rather been doing. So, with that in mind, I encourage you to continue your outstanding work to help our patients and their families overcome the fear and anxiety of visiting hospitals.
I hope you enjoy reading these sentiments (that have been slightly edited for privacy) as much as I enjoyed receiving them, and I hope to read more in the future.
Good afternoon,My mom has been a patient for a few years now at UMMC. We have been in and out of the hospital and have gone to other hospitals in the South over the past year from being sick with {edited}. We have never been treated with such care as we have at UMMC. Especially the Bone Marrow Transplant unit. They are some of the nicest, most caring, and encouraging staff. From Jamie who takes out the trash and cleans the rooms, to the techs, to every single nurse we have had {edited}, to the Nurse Practitioners, and the doctors -- every single person we have come in contact with here has been exceptional.
{Edited} so many memories and lots of new people that have come into our lives that I will never forget.
I just wanted to let you know about our wonderful experience.
Dr. LouAnn Woodward,
Having the news delivered to you that someone you love has been diagnosed with cancer is frightening—when that someone is your {edited} child, it's devastating. The next news that was delivered to us was that her treatment would require six months of in-patient chemotherapy—chemotherapy that would need to start the very next day. Thankfully, mine and my husband's employers were willing to work with us on leaves of absence, but we still had other children and our home to manage. As such, we did what other families have been forced to do and chose to “divide and conquer.” I stayed in the hospital with our baby girl, while my husband did the work of two parents back home. When the opportunity arose, he also stayed in the hospital with us. We carried on in this manner {edited}. I could relay to you the details of all the inconveniences we endured and all the incredibly difficult days and nights we experienced as a function of parents watching their baby girl receive treatment for {edited}, but that's not the purpose of this email.
Nothing can truly ease the pain of watching your child be infused with powerful poisons in an attempt to save her life. That being said, the residents/fellows, nurses, and support staff on 3C came as close as humanly possible on countless occasions and are, in our opinion, second to none when it comes to care of these children. As I'm sure you understand, being a pediatric nurse means you have more than one patient per room. Each time they enter into a patient's room, they are treating not only the patient, but also their families. The nurses and staff on 3C demonstrated a compassion and care for our baby girl—and for us—that can only be described as phenomenal. They were attentive and anticipatory of her needs, as well as ours. They truly became our extended family for the duration of our stay at Batson, and were many times, the difference between despair and hope. Our four primary nurses (two for days and two for nights) became our constants during this unpredictable and unprecedented time in our lives (Mak Rowzee, Lacy Pace, McKenzie Slay, and Randy Mullins). There were so many others, though, who contributed toward making a difficult time more bearable (e.g., Dr. Lindsey Kent, Dr. Omama Ahmad, Elizabeth Posey, Jennifer Alexander, Amanda Phan, Baylie LeBlanc, Logan LeBlanc, Jayrica Gipson, Bryce Hughes, Jamie Dornan, Elaine Hobson, Victoria Stevens, Reagan Thornton, Kristin Barnes, Drew Stringer, Shirley Bell, Anna Claire Cooke, Lawana Brown, Ethel with housekeeping, the food service employees, and the gentlemen who checked the tidiness of the rooms at night). While this may resemble a roster, it is not merely a list of names. I can give details and recount specific instances in which each of these employees improved our time at Batson. (There were so many individuals who we were blessed to have met; any omission was purely in error.)
I'm familiar with the DAISY Award and considered going that route with these thoughts but, there were just so many to include and their care goes beyond a particular incident or period of time. I am certain that God's grace is what got us through this and is the thing that has brought us to this point. I am equally certain that He put each and every one of those aforementioned individuals in our path because He knows of their unique worth and how truly gifted they are in what they do. I hope you never have to experience what we've been through in the last eight months but if you do, rest assured that you have angels walking amongst you on 3C and that you will not receive better care anywhere else
I know that you only hear when things go bad. I wanted to commend your staff in the Emergency Department and on 7 West. We had to basically force our {edited} son into inpatient care {edited}. It appears that all went well at admission and on 7 West. I wish I knew the names, but everyone shared a common goal. I saw him briefly today, and it’s like night and day. They dealt with him efficiently and compassionately. Thank you only begins to convey our gratitude!
I never tire of reading communications like these.
On a related note, we will be kicking off a new program that, we believe, will help further promote a positive patient-care environment and safe workspaces across the institution. Welle Training is a behavioral safety management program that we will use to train UMMC employees on proper and effective workplace violence de-escalation. For us to be effective in our jobs, we need to feel safe, and this new program should provide each of you with the peace of mind that comes with being ready for potentially tense or combative situations. When you are offered the opportunity to take advantage of this training, I encourage you to do so. Anything we can do to promote healthy workplaces – including in our clinical spaces – helps foster A Healthier Mississippi.