Understanding the Patient Experience
By: Matt Knoedel, MHA '17 Paige Moore (MHA '10, right) and Carol Ayangbile (MHA '13, second from right) offer feedback to first-year MHA students on a case study in patient experience. Imagine having your elderly mother fall ill and need to be hospitalized. You are terrified, you don’t know what is wrong with your mother and no one is able to tell you. Over the next couple days, she is shuttled between the hospital and her nursing home. As her condition becomes worse, she becomes hospitalized again. She is hooked up to some strange machines and becomes violently ill with an infectious disease. As she becomes more and more sick, the staff tell you they want to put her in hospice care. You don’t fully understand what this means and when you meet with the hospice nurse, she rudely asks “What do you need to know?” in an uncompassionate tone. You decide to use another hospice service nurse who explains more about hospice, but you are still worried. Your mother’s do...