It has been incredibly rewarding to see this week’s patient experience celebrations across healthcare internationally and within the United States.

During PX week, our Healthcare Experience Foundation team had the opportunity to collaborate and provide education and development to over 30 organizations across the country to improve the patient experience. One of the questions we asked participants, “When patients look back on their experience, what do you want them to remember about you?”

The feedback we received in the word cloud analysis was striking: The most sizable and significant ways people want to be remembered are compassionate, kind and caring.

In healthcare, we tend to care for people during their “flashbulb” moments- those times in their lives where memories are etched in stone (e.g., where you were when you heard about 911, were proposed to, learned of a difficult diagnosis). Whether large or small, we remember our healthcare moments because they are deeply personal to us and they impact our lives greatly.

As we move beyond a wildly successful PX Week 2019, let’s be vigilant to make this a personal mission, not a J.O.B. A colleague recently reminded us that we have an unlimited number of Number One priorities. Let’s challenge ourselves to be consistently the person who displays the attributes we want to be remembered for. Let’s challenge ourselves to make PX Week, not an initiative or a once-a-52-week celebration but a way of life to celebrate the core of our work in healthcare, the patient experience.

For more information, contact Katie Owens, President of the Healthcare Experience Foundation at katie@healthcareexperience.org.

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