People Remember
When You See Them.
I staff hospitals across the country for a living. Then I sat in a waiting room with my own family and understood what that actually means.
My wife is a respiratory therapist. She has been in healthcare our entire marriage.
In all that time she has never once come home and told me about a machine. Not a vent setting, not a piece of equipment, not a protocol. She comes home and tells me about people. The man who was frightened. The family who did not understand what they were being told. The patient who made her laugh on a hard shift.
That is what the job actually is to the people doing it, and I think that is worth sitting with before anyone builds another patient experience initiative.
Then it came to our family
My wife’s grandmother went on hospice. Near the end, we all went to the hospital where she was staying.
It is a big family and a close one. Almost every Sunday they gathered for dinner, all the kids and grandkids and great grandkids, a full house every week for years. So when it came to this, everybody came.
We were in a waiting area, a lot of us, eating pizza and taking turns going back to see her. Saying goodbye in shifts, which is a strange thing to do and also the only way it works when there are that many people who love someone.
At one point I looked up and watched a nurse come out of her room.
I recognised her.
She had been to our office. She was a traveler who worked for us, and at some point she had come in to meet her recruiter face to face, the way some of them do.
I got goosebumps sitting there.
I know what we do. I know we staff facilities across the entire country and in our own backyard. I have looked at those numbers more times than I can count. But it landed completely differently in that room, because that was not a placement. That was the person making sure my wife’s grandmother was cared for at the end of her life.
The work stopped being work for a second.
She was not a placement.
She was the person taking
care of my family.
What patient experience actually is
Most organisations treat patient experience as a score to be moved. There is a committee, there is a dashboard, there is usually a campaign with a name.
None of that is what patients are actually responding to.
Patient experience is walking into the building and being greeted like a person rather than processed. It is walking down a hallway and either getting a friendly nod from someone in scrubs or being looked straight through. It is whether the person who came into the room seemed to be in a hurry to leave it.
It is dozens of interactions a day, most lasting under a minute, none of which appear on anyone’s improvement plan.
And here is the thing people underestimate. Patients cannot evaluate your clinical quality. They are not qualified to. What they can evaluate, with complete accuracy, is whether they felt like a person to you.
That is the whole thing. People remember when you see them.
The evidence for this is stranger than you would expect
If that sounds soft, there is a piece of research that makes it concrete in a way I have not been able to forget.
Researchers at the University of Kansas Hospital ran a randomised study with 120 post-operative patients. The only thing they changed was whether the physician sat down or stayed standing during the visit. They timed the actual interactions and then asked patients how long they thought it had lasted.
When the doctor stood, the visit averaged about one minute twenty-eight seconds, and patients estimated it at roughly three minutes forty-four. When the doctor sat, the visit averaged about one minute four seconds, and patients estimated five minutes fourteen.
Read that again. The seated visits were shorter in real time and were experienced as nearly five times longer than they were. Ninety-five percent of patients whose doctor sat spoke positively about the encounter, against sixty-one percent of those whose doctor stood. Published in Patient Education and Counseling, 2012.
Nobody was given more time. Nothing was added to anyone’s workload. One person lowered themselves into a chair.
This is the part that should get attention from anyone trying to improve scores in an understaffed building. The lever is not more minutes. Nobody has more minutes. The lever is what happens inside the minute you already have.
Why this matters to the people delivering it
There is a second reason I care about this, and it has less to do with patients than with staff.
My wife tells me about people because that is what she remembers. So do the travelers I have hired for years. Almost nobody comes into this work for the documentation. They come for the moments where they mattered to somebody, and those moments are the fuel that gets a person back into the building on a hard morning.
When an organisation strips the human part out of the job, when everything becomes throughput and metrics and charting, it does not just cost patients. It burns out the staff, because you have taken away the thing that made the work worth doing.
Protecting the small moments is a retention strategy as much as a patient experience one. That is not sentiment. It is the same mechanism running in both directions.
Patients cannot judge
your clinical quality.
They can judge exactly
how you made them feel.
None of these require more time
- Sit down. The research is unusually clear and the cost is nothing. If there is a chair, use it. If there is not, get to eye level some other way.
- Acknowledge people in hallways. Patients, families, and each other. Being walked past while you are frightened is its own small injury, and the fix takes half a second.
- Say something that is not clinical. One question about the person rather than the condition. It changes what the encounter is for both of you.
- Tell your staff what they did. Specifically. Most of them will never hear from the family they helped, and the ones who feel invisible are the ones who leave.
What I took from that waiting room
I have spent my career on the supply side of this. Filling roles, moving clinicians to places that need them, watching fill rates and vacancy numbers.
Sitting in that waiting area with pizza on my lap, waiting for my turn to go back and say goodbye, that all collapsed into something much simpler. Somewhere in a building near you right now, someone is doing this for a family they have never met and will never see again.
They will not remember the protocol. They will remember whether that person looked at them.
The work is always personal. It just is not always personal to you.
Patients cannot assess your clinical quality, but they can assess with total accuracy whether they felt like a person to you. The research shows a doctor who sits spends less actual time and is experienced as staying nearly five times longer. The lever is not more minutes, because nobody has more minutes. It is what happens inside the ones you already have, and your staff need those moments as much as your patients do.
Keynotes and
workshops.
Chris runs national healthcare staffing organizations and speaks to health systems, associations, and clinical teams on patient experience, retention, and the small moments that decide how care actually feels.
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