How to Improve Patient Comfort
It’s important to improve patient comfort in your hospital, clinic, or medical facility for many reasons. Even if you think your patients are as comfortable as possible, it never hurts to try new things. Read on for tips on how to improve patient comfort and why it’s important to do so.
Why is Patient Comfort Important?
The contemporary medical experience is difficult to go through. Between uncomfortable medical procedures and nerve-wracking interactions, most people dread even visiting a hospital, let alone staying in one. Making those who have to be there more comfortable is vital to enhancing their healing process.
Medical facilities with environments that generate genuine patient comfort benefit from increased volume, loyalty, and referrals. For improved rates of patient turnover and satisfaction, patient comfort is the secret ingredient.
Issues with Current Understandings of Patient Comfort
Healing is a complicated, multifaceted, and individuated process. There’s an allure to understanding patient comfort as objectively as possible. But trying to box the healing process into a textbook definition has led to some confined translations and ineffective efforts.
The most common definition of a “healing environment” is one that “enhances cohesion of mind, body, and spirit and promotes social cohesion and healing relationships.” While that sounds well and good, it’s rather lofty, vague, and mostly unreachable.
Practical Ways to Improve Patient Comfort
Thankfully, there are some practical ways to improve your patients’ comfort. Here are a few proven methods:
Reduce Exposure
Most people won’t enjoy spending weeks inside a fishbowl. If your patient rooms are highly visible from the outside, that lack of privacy infringes heavily on their comfort. To anxiety-prone patients, being stuck in these kinds of rooms can feel overwhelming.
While you can’t change the design of your patient rooms, you can implement items like curtains or blinds to give your patients additional privacy. Additionally, talking to your patients about their feelings can help them open up and start a valuable discussion about their comfort needs.
Use Private Rooms
Having to share a room with another sick person is not only uncomfortable, but it can also be dangerous. If a snoring or talkative roommate keeps a patient from sleeping well, they aren’t going to recover quickly. For this reason, private rooms are rapidly becoming a staple rather than an exception.
If you can’t ensure a private room, consider investing in high-quality privacy curtains. These items can make a big difference.
Invest in Quality Linens and Gowns
If comfort is the goal, there’s no better place to invest than in the materials that will be constantly in contact with patients. The difference a scratchy blanket or warm comforter make in a good night’s sleep is substantial. Additionally, a comfortable and non-revealing gown will make patients less anxious and stressed.
Encouraging good sleep and enabling consistent comfort could be game-changing factors in healing rates, patient turnover, and their remembered experience.
Get Clean, Quality, Consistent Linens and Uniforms Through Medico
The importance of obtaining clean, comfortable, high-quality linens and uniforms through a trusted provider can’t be stressed enough. Your patients are always in contact with their linens and gowns. If those materials aren’t comfortable, that’s a problem. If they aren’t cleaned well, that could be a disaster. A job as important as providing top-notch linens to your medical facility shouldn’t be left to just anybody.
Only a time-tested and trusted provider like Medico can provide the quality and satisfaction to keep things running smoothly. For more information, give us a call at (800) 464-6334 or visit our website: https://www.medicolinen.com/.
