Boosting staff morale helps improve patient satisfaction score.

Boosting staff morale helps improve patient satisfaction score. In less than five years, Methodist Medical Center in Peoria, IL, improved its emergency department's patient satisfaction scores almost five-fold, moving them into the top tier of all hospitals surveyed in 2004. This drastic turnaround involved changes to both the physical and managerial structure of the department, creating new staff positions for patient advocacy, and implementing a regular schedule of meetings targeting quality improvement at multiple levels of care.