Captain. Team leader. Shepherd. Adviser. In the world of inpatient hospital care, these terms are often used to describe the physician’s role. However, Gallup’s core measures of inpatient loyalty, which are used to support quality improvement at hospitals, don’t include any specific questions about physicians. As a Gallup healthcare consultant, I am often asked why. Is this an oversight, or are doctors not as important as everyone thinks?
Why Doctors Aren’t Included in Gallup Inpatient Surveys
The core items on the Gallup survey are strong predictors of patient loyalty -- they include things like their perceptions of the hospital’s reputation, and ratings of contact with nurses and administrative staff. When it comes to inpatient measurement, items about doctors aren’t as predictive.
That may seem strange to some, but it shouldn’t surprise those familiar with inpatient healthcare. People are vital to patient loyalty, and nurses are the primary people with whom inpatients interact. Nurses are always there; physicians tend to appear only periodically during rounds. Nurses deliver most of the care and answer most of the questions. They are the staff members that patients depend on most. Consequently, positive responses to survey items on nursing care are those most likely to predict feelings of loyalty among inpatients.
Is the Doctor Unimportant to Inpatient Loyalty?
But just because questions about doctors are not included in Gallup’s core inpatient measurement questions does not mean that they are unimportant in fostering inpatient loyalty. Gallup’s research shows that doctors are actually vital to driving inpatient loyalty, just in a more indirect fashion.
One of the core items on Gallup’s survey measures the patient’s perceived image of a hospital’s quality of services -- a perception that may begin to develop even before the patient’s hospital experience, through the hospital’s reputation in the community. How do patients decide which hospital is the best? They select the hospital that they have heard has the best doctors and technology.
Nurses, as the main source of human interaction with patients in the hospital, are the primary drivers of a patient’s satisfaction with his or her inpatient experience. However, the caliber of the doctors at a hospital drives patient perceptions of the institution’s overall quality.