Story by Amy Cherry, Photos by Ashley Barnas
When a person is told they have a life-threatening illness, they won’t hear anything else.
But what a doctor or medical provider says next is pivotal. That’s where empathy comes into play.
“The doctor or the medical provider must really stop and ask questions of the patient: what are they thinking? What are they feeling? And really build that relationship,” said Sheryl Kline, deputy dean and Aramark Chaired Professor in the University of Delaware’s Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics.
Empathy is one intricate piece of the Patient Experience Academy, an interdisciplinary collaboration at the University of Delaware.
The Patient Experience (PX) Academy was born in 2014 and first launched with ChristianaCare, where 1,000 staff and medical providers were trained in hospitality healthcare.
“The program drove ChristianaCare’s patient experience scores over the 90th percentile as measured by more than 8,000 patients who responded to the surveys. This level of achievement is the goal for almost every healthcare organization,” said Ali Poorani, the academy’s faculty director and principal investigator, who’s also an associate professor of hospitality business management in Lerner.
Based on the success of the hospital program, the Wilmington VA approached the University in 2018, seeking to bring the PX Academy to its healthcare.
The VA Patient Experience Academy initially launched with managers and saw strong results.
While the program was paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, its success spawned a new two-year contract between UD and the Wilmington VA. A virtual program launched in October. The virtual training will reach as many as 700 Wilmington VA employees in the region, including doctors and nurses.
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