Aging & Social Change: Ninth Interdisciplinary Conference

Abstract

Elderly patient safety and satisfaction play a great role in quality of care. “Does the implementation of a call light response time protocol lead to increased patient satisfaction and a decreased fall rate on the medical-surgical floor at a South Florida Hospital?” is the question this study sought to answer. The change project was carried out in an acute care setting involving the replacement of a staff response time protocol with a more efficient one that reduced staff response time to within two minutes and improved patient safety and satisfaction. The staff call light protocol on the medical-surgical was replaced by a new one carefully crafted after a survey carried out among the unit floor healthcare staff to identify the areas of weaknesses and restraining forces that caused the previous protocol to be ineffective. The new protocol was implemented and data collected and analyzed. The analysis showed a slight decrease in response time. The number of calls also reduced, improving patient safety. While the post discharge survey did not show any significant change in patient satisfaction, it still remained in the 90 percentile range it was before the institution of the new protocol. This could be attributed to the fact that the sample size was so small given the short time of implementation of the new protocol. A shortcoming of the project was the limited implementation time which did not provide enough data to actually show a significant decrease in the response time.