Ministry of Hospital Chaplains

Patient Satisfaction

Marjorie A Lyon, Larry VandeCreek

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317948773
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

Evaluating the success of hospital chaplaincy has been a difficult task, but finally an effective approach has been developed. Ministry of Hospital Chaplains: Patient Satisfaction presents the Patient Satisfaction Instrument for Pastoral Care (PSI) which measures the quality and character of spiritual care and can contribute to the establishment of professional norms. To find out whether specific changes in pastoral practices lead to increased satisfaction among patients, this test can be used periodically. As you will see, this allows managers and department heads to identify and monitor specific functions and areas in which improvement is needed.Ministry of Hospital Chaplains will help you analyze the background variables that are associated with patient satisfaction, the styles of pastoral care that are linked to better hospital outcomes, and the usefulness of different pastoral activities. In the end, you will be able to use empirical evidence to demonstrate to hospital administrators that patients appreciate pastoral care and that chaplains are helping patients recuperate, experience an easier time at the hospital, and get home more quickly. Besides discussing how to evaluate the effectiveness of chaplains, this insightful book explores:

• enacting continuous improvement efforts
• pastoral care characteristics that predict a patient's readiness to return home
• how attention to details can build protocols that respond to patients
• questionnaire responses from 2, 000 discharged hospital patients in the U.S. and Canada
• why the need to evaluate the benefits of pastoral care exists
• the aspects of pastoral care most important to patientsChaplains in general and those in psychiatric hospitals, hospital administrators, managed care directors, and seminary professors of pastoral care will be glad to know that a technique for evaluating pastoral services has finally arrived. The guessing game is over. Now, you will know what your patients think of the services your hospital offers, and you can measure alternative approaches to pastoral care delivery when discontent is registered.

Patient Satisfaction with the Ministry of Hospital Chaplains

Now we come to the satisfaction scores. How did patients evaluate the ministry of chaplains? As results in Table 2 reveal, the mean score for all the positively worded items was 3.53 with a standard deviation of .70; the mean for the negative items (third subscale) was 1.29 (SD = .68). Remember that these results are created on a 1-4 scale in which scores closer to 4 are more positive. Scores for the negative items are the exception because scores closer to 1 are more positive.

This is a point at which to sit back and reflect for a few moments about these scores. They are really quite strong! An average score of 3.5 for the total sample is exciting! And, remember that these results reflect the work of chaplains with 2000 patients in 32 hospitals. That large sample from a diversity of hospitals increases the significance of the results. They are not created by a few dozen hand-picked patients who gave testimonials on behalf of chaplains. And these results are the product of a scale with many diverse items. Hospital chaplains can justifiably be proud of their contribution and use these results to establish themselves more firmly in the health care field.

We refined these global results by reporting the subscale scores (also in Table 2) and they promote an understanding of how chaplains were helpful. The ministry to the patient’s private concerns (subscale 4) received the most positive evaluation scores (3.69). This was followed by the supportive ministry (3.49) and the coping subscales (3.40).

As described previously, some patients used the N/A response for selected items, thus limiting the number of responses on the Likert scale. Table 2 also reports the percentage of Likert scale responses for each item. The reader may wish to refine the results by taking into account the percentage of respondents for each item. Certainly it is appropriate to reduce some of the high scores when only a limited percentage of patients responded on the Likert scale. In the Appendix we report results from a model which takes account of both the mean score and the number of respondents, creating a weighted mean. Readers may wish to refer to those materials for further development of these results.

TABLE 2. Means and Standard Deviations for PSI Scores

	Item%	Mean	SD
Totals for the Positive Subscales (1, 2 & 4)		3.53	.70
Totals for the Negative Subscale (3...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHORS
• Preface
• Introduction
• A Perspective on Patient Satisfaction
• Background on the Patient Satisfaction Instrument and the Current Data Bank
• How Can the Results Be Maximized?
• Patient Satisfaction with the Ministry of Hospital Chaplains
• Characteristics of Pastoral Care That Contribute to Better Patient Outcomes (from the Patients’ Viewpoint)
• What Have We Learned?
• So What? Implications for Hospital Pastoral Care
• How Can You Use the PSI?
• Appendix: Weighted Mean Scores
• Index