Question

What is 360 degrees feedback? Why is it important? explain in details with perfect example.

Answer 1

The healthcare industry has a unique set of challenges when it comes to measuring performance.

While most healthcare institutions are proficient at measuring functional skills and job-specific abilities, vital non-clinical skills like professionalism, empathy, communication, patient management, relationships with colleagues and healthcare teams receive less attention. These all play a factor in the performance of physicians, nurses, aides, administrators, and leaders. Most importantly, these factors also affect the quality of patient care.

Institutions are now addressing this gap in performance reviews, and are looking at non-clinical skills within their medical teams with the use of 360 degree performance evaluations in healthcare settings. A 360 degree review can assess both clinical and non-clinical skills from multiple perspectives and provide useful, actionable results (such as identifying strengths and areas of improvement, ensuring that healthcare professionals at all levels have the support they need, and the tools necessary to improve the effectiveness and quality of patient care).

Advantages of 360 Degree Evaluation in Healthcare:

Unique Perspectives on Physician Performance

In a medical clinic or hospital, there exists a chain of command and hierarchy that is necessary to ensure that medical teams can quickly and thoroughly examine, assess and treat patients. When it comes to the workplace evaluation of physicians, nurses or aides, they are usually based on clinical successes and failures, and neglect to assess soft, interpersonal skills such as bedside manner, empathy, interaction with healthcare teams, professionalism, and attentiveness to patients.

360 evaluation tools for healthcare address this issue by using multiple groups of assessors such as supervisors, peers, subordinates, allied health professionals and patients. Each assessor experiences and observes different aspects of the healthcare professional’s performance, and can provide valuable perspectives that are important to the quality and effectiveness of the care provided.

Improve Quality of Care

360 degree performance evaluations in healthcare, particularly when combined with follow-up training, can be a valuable training tool, improving both physician performance and patient care. Healthcare professionals can learn a great deal of information from their 360 degree assessment and take a proactive approach to reinforce strengths, and learn how to improve on weaknesses in areas such as patient communication, team leadership or professionalism.

Healthcare professionals care deeply about their work and want to do the best they can for patients. But, they might not be aware that specific behaviours or actions might be having a negative effect on patients or coworkers. 360’s empower healthcare teams to focus on self-improvement in identified problem areas, develop effective interpersonal skills, express themselves in constructive ways to coworkers and patients, and improve the quality of patient care.

Improve Patient Satisfaction

Healthcare teams have varying levels of interaction with patients. Physicians might only see a patient for a half-hour, while nurses and aides have more extensive interactions with those under their care, and experience first hand the effect that physician performance has on a patient. This is why 360 evaluation tools for healthcare are invaluable. Traditional evaluations are usually top-down with supervisors assessing the performance of physicians in their team.

With 360 performance evaluations, a more wholesome evaluation is conducted, including reviews by superiors and subordinates, and providing a more accurate assessment of performance from multiple perspectives. The result is that healthcare executives, patient care leaders, physician leaders, physicians, nurses and aides can take a proactive approach, learn their 360 degree reviews, undergo personal and professional development, and have an immediate, meaningful impact on patient satisfaction.