Patient Rounding – a Win-Win Situation

In an era where health care transparency is continuously evolving and developing, patient safety and patient satisfaction are paid of greater attention. Patient satisfaction is one of the major outcomes in performing rounds; some institution does it hourly some in every 2 hours. Apart from patient satisfaction a lot of other things that is indeed very beneficial not only among patients but as well as among health care provider. Some of which will be sited on further more.

 While a lot of organizations is working on issues related to pain management, response to call bells, personal needs and on improving sensitivity to patients’ inconvenience, patient rounding is an effective process to shape patient’s experience.

Firstly Patient rounding is done to improve the quality of care being given to patients. This is one of a good way in order for nurses to assess for patient safety and comfort. Knowing that someone will soon be in checking on you, the use of call bells decreases once the patients understand that the nurse will round consistently to address their issues they stop using the call bells. Hence it gives comfort and ease among patients.

Patients have a more positive view on the timely response to requests and the discussion of their needs by nursing staff, through such rounds patient satisfaction increases. This way nurses are able to ask patients on a regular basis about care needs and checking the patient environment to make sure that it is clean and uncluttered and that everything is within reach of the patient. Another benefit of Patient rounding is that, rounds create an incredible sense of trust and safety in patients. Proactive rounding reduce the number of patient falls, as more often than not its intervened before a fall occurs and same goes to a decreased occurrence of pressure ulcer incidence.

Secondly rounds can lead to a better care by building trust between patients and health care providers, hence not just about health care professionals giving attention to patients but this is also a good way of involving patients in their care. Rounds as well promote anticipatory help rendered to the bedside before the patient realizes the problem and requests assistance. It greatly helps in improving efficiency on nurses and the entire health care team in general for preventing any adverse accidents or instances that can happened, as always, prevention is better than cure.

With regular patient rounding communication is better, there’s freer information flow from the patient and vice versa. Patient rounding also promotes clinical outcome, quieter nursing units and decreases patient length of stay. Not only has that, rounding helped patients understand the quality of the care they are receiving. The above mentioned are just one of the many benefits of performing Patient Rounds, it is indeed a very vital task to do for our nurses. It might sounds so “routinary” for some but definitely important, for as the advantages greatly outweighs the disadvantages and indeed it is a win-win situation for the both parties – patient and health care provider.