Dr. Christy Dempsey is Chief Nursing Officer Emerita at Press Ganey, where she offered clinical guidance to help clients transform the patient experience. Her work has led to significant results, including reducing hospital waiting times by up to 70%, improving patient satisfaction by double-digit percentiles, developing and enhancing teamwork and leadership, and improving operations through scheduling, staffing, and data integration.
In addition, she has been a faculty member of the Missouri State University Department of Nursing since 2008 and is active in the American Nurses Association (ANA) and the Missouri Organization of Nurse Leaders. Here are some highlights from her conversation with Look Left’s Davida Dinerman.
- Nurses, while highly skilled and trusted, don’t get all the credit they deserve: “Nurses bring business acumen, teamwork, and leadership, and I would like to see nurses viewed in a different light because of those attributes. That’s starting to change, and it should. I’m seeing more and more nurses in chief operating officer positions and chief executive officer positions—and that’s a good thing.”
- The use of technology in nursing is a double-edged sword: “It’s making a lot of the things we do better. Data is at the core; we have to make decisions based on data. The problem I see in most organizations right now is that they’ve got oodles of data. They have more data than they’ve ever had before, but they don’t know what to do with it. I think making sure that the technology is integrated, that it all talks to each other, and that we have a way to make sense of all of the data to make evidence-based decisions is where we have to go. And we’re not there yet.”
- The pandemic offered Christy the opportunity to step back into a temporary patient-facing activity: “I was a volunteer vaccinator for a COVID-19 vaccine clinic, and it was so much fun. I worked with one of my students; I gave shots all day. I do miss that. I live in Springfield, Missouri, which is a hotbed of COVID-19 right now. I wish more people would be vaccinated. If I could go out and give 100 more shots today, I would do it.”
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