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Effective nurse communication, including listening skills, is essential to a positive nurse-patient relationship. This two-group comparative study identified how adult hospitalized patients perceived effective and ineffective nurse active empathetic listening (AEL) behaviors. Participants identified the AEL behavior most important to them, providing guidance to prioritize interventions to enhance the perception of being listened to.
Patients spend more time with nurses than any other healthcare professional. The primary conduit of information between the patient and healthcare team are nurses; therefore, nurses need to be good communicators. Careful listening is at the core of good communication and is a key element of patient safety and experience (Balik & Dopkiss, 2010). A key component of nurse-patient communication is the patient's perception of their experience with the nurse listening. Despite the known importance and impact on patient experience, quality outcomes, and reimbursement, there is a gap in research on effective nurse communication from the patient's perspective.
Healthcare's shift from volume to value requires hospitals to focus on performance and quality outcomes, such as patient experience, as measured by the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey. The nursing communication domain within the survey has the greatest impact on the patient's overall experience score (Studer Group, 2012). The first series of HCAHPS survey questions focus on patient care received from nurses (Centers Medicare & Medicaid Services [CMS], 2020). It asks about being treated with courtesy and respect, nurse listening, and the nurse's ability to explain things in a way the patient can understand.
Patient experience, a key hospital performance metric, is a component of value-based purchasing (VBP), which holds providers accountable by linking Medicare reimbursement to outcomes. For FY17, the VBP program affected 2% of the base operating payments to hospitals. This resulted in $1.7 billion in Medicare payments being withheld from hospitals because of poor performance on the HCAHPS survey measuring patient experience (Becker's Hospital Review, 2017). Research by Press Ganey® revealed hospitals focusing on improving the nurse communication metric could potentially influence 15% of their VBP incentive payment (Rodak, 2013). The financial consequences of poor patient experience influenced by nurse communication further support the need to address the gap in nursing science.
Press Ganey (2013) conducted a hierarchical variable clustering analysis on all eight...