Impacting the Patient's Experience in a Children's Hospital Using a Communication Bundle Strategy.

BACKGROUND: The aim of this quality improvement project was to determine whether a communication bundle would impact parents' ratings of nurse-child communication in relation to (a) how often the nurse listened carefully to the child and (b) how often the nurse explained things in a way easy for the child to understand.

LOCAL PROBLEM: The Child Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) scores on the unit lagged behind the hospital's 75th percentile external benchmark established by the National Research Corporation.

METHODS: A convenience sample of the unit's staff participated in the project.

INTERVENTIONS: The outcome measure was a comparison of Child HCAHPS scores and percentile ranks for the questions pre- and postimplementation of the communication bundle.

RESULTS: Following implementation of the communication bundle, the unit's patient satisfaction scores for both questions exceeded the 75th-percentile benchmark.

CONCLUSIONS: This project enhanced nurse communication at the bedside and the parent's perception of nurse-child communication.