Tool to Improve Patient Satisfaction
Team Exercise: Anxiety Mapping

Engage your team and improve patient satisfaction with anxiety mapping. Use this worksheet to guide them in identifying the steps along their customers’ pathway through your service. Ask them to tap into their empathy and their own experience as a patient or patient’s loved one and identify the likely anxieties that customers feel at each step along this service pathway. Finally, develop anxiety reduction strategies by addressing two questions:

What can staff do or say to prevent anxiety at each step?
What can staff do or say to relieve anxiety at each step? You’ll be amazed at how this simple process yields a multitude of improvements!

See a simple example for the Surgical Waiting Area below.

Steps Along Patient/Customer Pathway Through Service	Likely Anxiety Points During This Step	Experience Design: Your Anxiety-Reducing Ideas: What can staff do or say to prevent the anxiety? What can staff do or say to relieve anxiety at this point

Example: Surgical Waiting Area

Step in Service Process	Likely Anxieties at That Step	How to Reduce This Anxiety
Family sitting in Surgery Waiting Room	Anxiety about loved one’s progress and condition Waiting as every minute feels like an hour	Scheduled every 30 minutes -- a nurse liaison goes to Surgical Suite, talks to nurses and the surgeon and reports back to family spokesperson with an update.

Return from Improve Patient Satisfaction with Anxiety Mapping to Hospital Patient Satisfaction

Return to Quality Patient Experience Home

Tool to Improve Patient Satisfaction Team Exercise: Anxiety Mapping

Tool to Improve Patient Satisfaction
Team Exercise: Anxiety Mapping