LABOR & Delivery — Your Opportunity to Create Lifelong Patients

Ensure your medical team is equipped to build long-term relationships with patients, from their first doctor visit to their child's well visits throughout their childhood. Additionally, encourage dining and EVS teams to engage patients when visiting their rooms through polite conversations, smiles and kind words.

While delivering the highest level of medical care, also aim to deliver the highest level of service in dining and EVS to ensure they are comfortable throughout their entire stay.

Bring flexibility to the table to respond to new mothers’ special requests, such as a comforting meal after giving birth.

Bring elements of patients’ lives outside of the hospital into the experience, such as high-quality and customized dining experiences.

Make room for visitors and add homey touches such as comfortable chairs.

Give labor and delivery patients a convenient way to ask questions and request special services.

The full-service restaurant model of food service satisfies patients’ desire for fresh ingredients, trend-forward options and customization.

Best practices for delivering restaurant-style dining services include:

• Made-to-order options, like omelets, pasta, sandwiches, pizza, Bento boxes and salads 
• Ethnic cuisine, comfort foods and wholesome selections — including a menu rotation 
• Variety to meet specialty diet restrictions, such a plant-based options alongside meat-based counterparts 
• State-of-the-art meal delivery systems 
• Dedicated hotlines to call for assistance, ask questions, make substitutions or request additional options

To be satisfied, new moms must have a way to give feedback and know their questions, comments and concerns are heard. Mobile survey apps deliver real-time feedback, so healthcare administrators know how patients feel and can respond immediately.

Best practices in real-time patient feedback include:

• Remove manual patient satisfaction processes from a manager's workload. Allow them more time to spend on patient care and creating a relationship 
• Deploy technology-enabled feedback systems that allow patients to communicate about food services and EVS 
• Acknowledge patient feedback and act on it quickly, so patients gain an immediate benefit 
• Identify and address patients' nonclincial issues proactively, before they voice concerns to nurses or other clinical staff

Continuity of care includes the overall friendliness and helpfulness of every single member of the hospital team. When staff members are courteous and helpful, patients feel more satisfied with their overall hospital experience.

Best practices in staff hospitality include:

• Train the staff members to be kind and cheerful and respond to any in-person patient requests 
• Train nutritional assistants to interact with patients and families about their meal options, delivery and special requests, and nutritional needs

Most babies do not enter the world in time for their moms to have a meal on a typical timeframe. When they are famished after giving birth, it’s natural to ask the nurses for a meal or snack.

Make it easy on the nursing staff to provide them with food options with these best practices:

• Keep unit kitchens stocked with extra trays, snacks and beverages for after-hours and between mealtime requests
• Respond promptly to patient and staff requests for additional or replacement meals and snacks
• Find ways to provide variety and appealing food choices, especially for long-term patients and those on restricted diets

Just like patients, guests also prefer dining options that meet their desire for healthy, delicious and customizable meals and snacks including:

Best practices for delivering restaurant-style dining services include:

• A variety of dining options — from café meals to grab-and-go snacks
• Customizable options — from sandwiches to omelets
• Flavor variety — such as ethnic meals and comfort foods
• Farm-to-table fresh and local ingredients
• Options that address diet restrictions, such plant-based meals
• Ordering a tray at mealtime to eat with new mothers

Babies don’t arrive at convenient dining times. So new parents’ visitors can arrive at any time of the night or day. Having access to convenient meals and snacks cannot only feed their hunger, but also help them spend more time with the parents and baby.

Best practices in providing convenient access to food around-the-clock include:

• Create easy access to food, drink and essentials your staff and visitors want through on-site, scalable retail solutions 
• Offer self-pay kiosks with a range of food options, such as sandwiches, salads, fruit and beverages 
• Add modern vending machines which provide convenient, healthy snack options

Outside of hospital settings, consumers rely on local and national brand-name restaurants to fill their cravings with foods they love, meet their dietary needs or help them feel comforted. They appreciate when they have similar options in hospitals — enjoying the familiar names, menu items and sense of place. That’s why many healthcare systems are installing brand-name food options in their cafes.

Best practices around brand-name dining options include:

• Look for national brands that are popular and give customers value
• Create a food court-style design with different brands at each station
• Aim for a variety, including international cuisine and healthy meals

Often hospital guests don’t crave full meals, just snacks. Filling this craving goes a long way toward guest and patient satisfaction.

Best practices for guest snacking include:

• Create a convenience store-type venue with grab-and-go selections 
• Provide a wide variety of snack options, such as sandwiches, salads and beverages

Delighting guests and patients involves thinking outside of the box to offer innovative ideas, such as unique food delivery venues. Hospitals can optimize guest and patient experiences by offering services such as coffee bars, smoothie stations and ice cream carts.

Room cleanliness is critical to both prevent the spread of healthcare associated infections (HAIs) to newborns and to help patients feel comfortable and safe. Two advanced processes help achieve these goals:

Clean rooms in a systematic order.

A systematic cleaning protocol should include starting at the door, then cleaning the room from right to left, high to low and most soiled to most clean areas. This ensures the staff does not miss frequently touched areas (high-touch points) and does not disturb patients by crisscrossing the room.

Clean “high-touch” areas.

Patients and visitors touch certain surfaces more frequently than others. These "high touch" areas scan become sources for HAIs. Identify these areas, such as door handles, remote controls, chair arms, bed rails and have an established cleaning protocol.

To ensure that front-line employees deliver optimal room cleanliness to labor and delivery patients, use these best practices:

• Have supervisor train EVS staff members using shoulder-to-shoulder teaching methods and explaining rationale for professional processes and tools utilized in a healthcare environment 
• Train staff on systematic cleaning methodology 
• Regularly observe EVS staff cleaning and engaging with patients

Patients are comforted by visual cues to communicate their room has been cleaned. For example, hotels use a variety of visual cues to showcase cleanliness, such as wrapping glasses in plastic and folding the ends of the toilet paper into V-shapes. Hospitals can adopt similar best practices in labor and delivery patient rooms, such as:

• Wrap the toilet seat with special bands of paper
• Fold towels, especially in creative or whimsical patterns 
• Fold end of toilet paper roll into v-shape 
• Provide table tent with EVS service description and housekeeper signature

The more positive EVS “touches” that labor and delivery patients receive, the higher their patient satisfaction. Ensure your EVS team members are friendly and visible, without being in the patient’s way.

A good best practice is to schedule outgoing and friendly employees strategically. Identify EVS staff members with engaging personalities and who connect well with patients, and staff them during peak patient-interaction hours.

To ensure EVS staff members do not miss an opportunity to improve services, instruct them to ask patients for feedback into making their stay more comfortable. Positive engagement with a patient and their family benefits the hospital through improved patient satisfaction scores.