Randy Harmatz

My colleague Christine Cassisi, director of the Patient Experience team, used a clever analogy in a recent presentation to leaders about patient satisfaction.

“We don’t say, ‘It’s OK to be a Florida Gator,’” she told the audience. “No. We say, ‘It’s great to be a Florida Gator!’”

She made me think about this well-known rallying cry and all the passion and commitment it implies for the game and the team and the goal of being the best. Here at UF Health, we want our patients, visitors, volunteers, and faculty and staff to have such a great experience and such great confidence in us that they can say without hesitation, “It’s great to be a patient at UF Health!”

What a difference a word makes. Measuring patient satisfaction involves semantics. We have carefully selected words in our post-visit surveys to help patients accurately and precisely reflect back to us the level of care they received. We ask them to rate the communication with their nurses and doctors, instructions about their care and medication, and how responsive we were to their needs. We ask how we managed their pain and about their discharge information, and about the cleanliness and quietness of the environment. We ask if they’d recommend us to other people. When these measures receive consistently high praise — when we are great in all areas — it drives our patient’s entire experience and satisfaction levels to where we need to be.

I’m going to sign off with something else Chris shared, a quote by Willie Mays, the baseball Hall of Famer. 

“It isn’t hard to be good from time to time, what’s tough is being good every day.”

It may not always be easy, but we are aiming high. Not just good, but great. Every day.