“Teamwork” has become the most important driver of strong inpatient experiences. This might seem surprising, but it shouldn’t be. Patients are extraordinarily sensitive observers of healthcare environments. They’re not just paying attention to how their care team interacts with them, but how clinicians interact with one another. When they leave the door open during a hospital stay, they’re tuning in to the most compelling reality show in their lives at that moment: the team caring for them.
Patients know the healthcare field is filled with caring and competent individuals. When patients look to a group of experts for help in their time of need, they pay attention to how cohesively they operate. But a pleasant conversation at the doctor’s office, on its own, doesn’t help patients navigate an increasingly complex healthcare system of multiple providers, departments, and specialists. The tension healthcare providers feel when they don’t have the proper communication channels or time to connect can sometimes trickle down to the patient.
Behind every sustainable and resilient healthcare system are teams working in harmony to deliver patient care. When caregivers enjoy strong teamwork and clear communication, patients feel the impact, and safety incidents are lower. But when employees aren’t effectively working as a team, employees and patients alike feel an erosion of confidence and loyalty. The ripple effects of poor teamwork extend far beyond patient experience scores.
The Single-Thread Connecting Patient Outcomes and Employee Experience
If clinicians don’t have the resources or time to build trust with each other, patient outcomes are at risk. Research shows miscommunication plays a major factor in patient safety and is even implicated in 60–70% of serious patient incidents. When we look at patient experience as a team sport, we can improve patient outcomes by building the foundations for a seamless team experience.
The burden of poor communication isn’t on individuals. It’s impossible to deliver exceptional care when teams are burned out and disconnected. Team effectiveness depends on how invested and engaged healthcare employees are in their organization and workload. Hospitals where staff report higher levels of teamwork have lower levels of intent to leave the organization. In an era of staffing shortages and unprecedented stress on healthcare workers, fostering strong teams becomes a strategic imperative for organizational survival.
Healthcare’s Complexity Needs Synchronicity
The connection between patient and employee experience is especially important to track as the healthcare system grows increasingly complex. Patients are no longer in the hands of a single provider. They have to navigate between teams of specialists and providers to get the care they need. When care teams don’t have the necessary trust in place to share critical information about the patient, the burden of coordination falls on the patient. On the other end of every fractured care team is a patient who is anxious because they’re receiving contradictory instructions or repeating their history to multiple providers.
No sole provider makes up the whole of the patient experience, and the best providers recognize this and lean into it. What sets top-performing organizations apart is the quality of their teams. The physicians consistently ranked in the top 1% for patient experience coordinate and communicate with their entire team, empowering different caregivers to engage their patients, reduce errors, and increase patient safety.
We’ve established that patients can’t trust their care team if their care team doesn’t trust each other, but what is the solution? The difficult truth is, improving teams’ effectiveness doesn’t happen overnight. Systemic issues like staffing shortages, broken hospital processes, and tight budgets can’t be overcome by individual efforts alone.
Team Dynamics Don’t Exist Without Intentional Investment
First, hospitals must invest in resources to create clear pathways for team coordination. This means an investment in leader development, communication structures, and always-on feedback processes. Healthcare leaders need to recognize that fostering strong teams goes beyond creating an organization’s culture. Only when seamless teamwork is the norm has the foundation for an exceptional patient experience been built.
When teams function in sync, patients feel safe and trust their providers to help them navigate the care system. They see structured handoffs happening at their bedside, specialists communicating effectively with primary care physicians, and even the pre-authorization of care to ensure coverage; every part of healthcare requires teamwork.
As the saying goes, a rising tide lifts all boats. When hospitals organize to show up as a cohesive team with shared intention and coordinated expertise, everyone benefits. Caregivers can lean on each other and, in turn, feel supported, and patients feel–and are–safer.
About Chrissy Daniels
Chrissy Daniels collaborates with teams across Press Ganey to design, develop, and deliver strategies to boost patient experience that are informed by over 400 million patient voices. Chrissy works closely with healthcare organizations nationwide as a strategic and operational partner.
