Overview
Do your patients feel welcome when they enter your practice? Do people from all cultures feel comfortable? Will patients who have difficulty reading be able to find the restroom or the check-out desk? Do patients face a barrage of paperwork when they first come in?
Patients may feel anxious or intimidated in a healthcare setting. Creating a friendly and easy-to-navigate environment may help your patients feel welcome and relaxed.
Action
Assess your practice.
- Shadow diverse patients or conduct a walk through. Navigating the Health Care System describes how to walk in the shoes of your patients to assess how welcoming your practice is.
- Review signs throughout your practice. Check with your clinic administration to find out if an approval process is required to change signs in your practice. Look at all the signs in your practice, and make sure they:
- Are visible and easy to read.
- Provide clear direction. Use signs to direct patients to common locations, such as the practice entrance, the check-in and check-out areas, exam rooms, lab, and restrooms.
- Are written in appropriate languages (i.e., written in the languages your patients read).
- Are gender neutral (e.g., all-gender restrooms).
- Use graphics when appropriate.
- Consider other approaches to help patients find their way, such as using color-coded lines paired with different shapes (to be color blind friendly) on the floors or walls.
- Review forms.
- Do they allow patients to indicate non-traditional family configurations (e.g., multiple parents, multigeneration household)?
- Are they inclusive of different gender and sexual identities? Find examples in Inclusive Language for Intake Forms.
- Tool 11: Assess, Select, and Create Easy-to-Understand Materials also has guidance on streamlining forms.
Train staff.
- First impressions count. The first person a patient talks to should be helpful, friendly, and respectful. Provide training to help staff be non-judgmental listeners with a customer service orientation.
- Do not forget the back office. Patients with billing questions often find it difficult to understand procedure codes and insurance practices. Teach your staff to provide easy-to-understand explanations of common billing and insurance concepts that avoid technical jargon.
- Go to Tool 3: Raise Awareness, Tool 4: Communicate Clearly, Tool 5: Use the Teach-Back Method, Tool 7: Be Easy to Reach, and Tool 10: Consider Culture for additional guidance on training.
Offer everyone help.
- You can't tell by looking which patients may need assistance, so offer all patients help. For example, you can offer help with:
- Forms that they are asked to fill out or sign.
- How to log in and use the patient portal.
- How to use telehealth services.
- How to get to a specialist or lab.
- Offer help in a friendly, non-stigmatizing way. For example:
- "Here are some forms to complete. You can fill them out now or wait until you get to the room and the medical assistant will be happy to go over them with you."
- "Many people find it hard to get started with a patient portal. Can I arrange for a class where someone can help you log on and use the portal?"
- "It can be challenging the first time you have a telehealth visit. If anything is not clear, please call us at [phone number] and we will be happy to go over the instructions with you."
- "Patients sometimes tell us the lab is hard to find. Let me draw you a map."
Assess language preferences.
- Ask patients what language they want you to speak and provide appropriate language access services. Go to Tool 9: Address Language Differences for further information.
Create a practice brochure.
- Develop an easy-to-understand brochure highlighting key elements of your practice, such as:
- Contact information, including after-hours and emergency information.
- Services provided.
- Address and directions to your office with a simple map.
- What to bring to appointments.
Make the waiting room inviting and informative.
- Do not overwhelm patients with too much material on walls or tables. Carefully curate materials, choosing only those that are most relevant to your patients. Consult Tool 11: Assess, Select, and Create Easy-to-Understand Materials for guidance on selecting easy to understand and act on materials.
- Display colorful posters to engage patients in their healthcare. Chose key concepts like:
- Asking questions (e.g., [PDF, 102 KB]).
- Remembering to take medicines correctly. (e.g., Help with Medicine Poster).
- Choose images and languages based on your patient population. Make sure pictures look like the patients you serve. Consult Language Access Resources for sources of multilingual patient education materials.
- Display photos of the care team, including names, titles, and key responsibilities, to help patients better understand the roles different members play. Remember to use simple words (e.g., use "doctor" and "nurse" instead of "physician" and "RN").
- Update materials regularly. Assign staff to update materials on a regular basis.
- Show easy-to-understand educational programming if you have a television in your waiting room. Keep the volume down and use closed captions.
Track Your Progress
Conduct an initial assessment of your practice environment by asking a patient or staff member to walk through your practice and assess the points discussed in this tool. After making changes and training staff, conduct additional walkthroughs and compare the results.
Have a volunteer observe in the reception area. Record the percentage of patients who were greeted warmly, treated respectfully, and offered help with forms and other tasks. Track the percentage over time.
Before implementing this tool and 2, 6, and 12 months later, collect patient feedback on a selection of questions about this tool from the Health Literacy Patient Feedback Questions.
Refer to Tool 2: Assess Organizational Health Literacy and Create an Improvement Plan to learn how to use data in the improvement process.
