Measuring and improving ambulatory surgery patients' satisfaction.

The pressure on perioperative services to improve quality for health care consumers creates both challenges and opportunities. To make positive changes, many health care organizations contract with Press Ganey (PG), which processes an extensive database of more than 9.5 million surveys annually and provides benchmark reports to same-type organizations. To measure and improve ambulatory surgery patient satisfaction at one health care network in northeastern Pennsylvania, the nursing leaders in the ambulatory surgery center and OR undertook a quality improvement project focused on educating perioperative nurses on the use of PG reports. After we reviewed the PG reports and implemented changes with nursing staff members in perioperative areas, PG patient satisfaction scores improved regarding information about delays (4.1%) and center attractiveness (0.2%). Copyright 2010 AORN, Inc. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.