Background: At our institution, bedside co-rounding with physicians and nurses has been promoted as a mechanism to facilitate care team communication. However, coordinating bedside co-rounding can be logistically challenging and time consuming, especially when patients and care team members are not geographically co-localized. Little is known on how bedside co-rounding impacts patient experience. We aimed to understand whether bedside co-rounding may significantly influence patient’s overall satisfaction with care team communication and perceptions of teamwork among their care team.
Methods: We completed semi-structured interviews with patients hospitalized on the general medicine service at a large, urban academic medical center. Patients were selected by convenience sampling and certified video medical interpreters were used to interview patients with limited English proficiency. We used Likert-scaled and open-ended questions to evaluate patients’ experiences with their care team communication. Interviews were transcribed and analyzed by a single interviewer using inductive content analysis.
Results: We completed 30 patient interviews. Interview participants had a mean age of 54 years (range 21-80 years), average length of stay of 13 days (range 1-78 days), and the majority (93%) were English-speaking. Overall, patients were very satisfied with communication from their primary physician (mean 4.83/5, with 90% patients responding the top option of “very satisfied”) and primary nurse (mean 4.8/5, with 86.7% patients responding the top option of “very satisfied”). Patients reported high ratings of perceived team work between physicians and nurses (89% rated the top option of “very good”). Most patients (66.7%) reported that they did not observe their primary doctor and primary nurse interacting. Bedside co-rounding (n=10) did not significantly impact patients’ ratings of satisfaction with physician and nurse communication or their perceptions of teamwork among their care team (Table 1). Many patient quotes supported the perception of robust communication between care team members despite not seeing their primary physician and primary nurse directly interacting.
Conclusions: In this study, it was not necessary to have both the primary physician and primary nurse bedside concurrently for patients to report high satisfaction with physician and nurse communication and to perceive strong teamwork between their care team members. Our results suggest that bedside co-rounding may not be required to optimize patient experience with care team communication. Instead, institutions could consider prioritizing interventions that encourage daily, proactive physician-nurse communication, even if not observed by the patient. Future research directions include investigating which clinical scenarios may most benefit from bedside co-rounding and exploring how existing technology with the use of secure messaging can augment inpatient communication to improve patients’ satisfaction with care team communication.
