Healthcare Leadership and Patient Experience: Five Tactics to Make Best Practices Stick

Patient experience leaders know the pattern. A new best practice launches with energy and optimism. Teams attend training, leaders communicate expectations, and early results look promising. Then competing priorities take over, and the practice slowly fades into the background. 

The fact is this: healthcare leadership and patient experience improvement succeed when organizations focus as much on sustaining change as they do on launching it.  

During a recent webinar with The Beryl Institute, Toya Gorley, Strategic Advisor at NRC Health, shared five practical tactics that help organizations turn evidence-based patient experience practices into lasting habits.

Patient experience improvements fail to stick when implementation receives more attention than adoption. Best practices are often introduced successfully, but sustaining them requires ongoing leadership, reinforcement, communication, and accountability.  

During the webinar, Gorley defined a best practice as “a method, technique, or approach that consistently delivers superior results.” She defined “sticking” as when a practice becomes consistent, automatic, and part of a routine over time.  

One theme appeared throughout the discussion: consistency matters more than permanence. Healthcare organizations evolve constantly, so the goal is not to preserve every process forever, but rather to create reliable behaviors that continue to deliver value for patients, families, and care teams.  

According to Gorley, sustainable change depends on leadership, co-design, education, training, observation, recognition, barrier removal, communication, capacity, data, and accountability working together.  

When a practice sticks, it becomes part of everyday culture rather than another initiative competing for attention. Healthcare leaders should review implementation plans with the same rigor they apply to launch plans.  

If a strategy focuses primarily on training, it will benefit from added attention to coaching, recognition, measurement, and accountability. 

Tactic #1: Embrace resistance to change

Healthcare leaders should expect resistance and view it as useful information. Gorley explained that change can feel disruptive, emotional, and uncertain for frontline teams. Care teams may worry about losing competence, changing routines, or taking on additional responsibilities.  

Resistance also often looks like pushback. But Gorley encouraged leaders to look deeper. In many cases, resistance signals that someone needs more clarity, more support, more involvement, or reassurance that the change will benefit patients and staff alike.  

During the webinar Q&A, Gorley described implementing “listening labs”—structured conversations designed to uncover barriers, understand concerns, and gather ideas from those closest to the work. She encouraged leaders to listen first rather than immediately offering solutions.  

The organizations that sustain change, Gorley emphasized, are not the ones that eliminate resistance—they’re the ones that learn from it. Before launching a new initiative, create space for frontline teams to identify barriers, share concerns, and help shape the approach. Those conversations often reveal the information needed to improve adoption from the start.

Tactic #2: Identify an executive sponsor 

Executive sponsorship creates the authority, visibility, and accountability needed to sustain change. According to Gorley, an executive sponsor should actively champion the practice, communicate expectations, remove barriers, align the effort with broader organizational priorities, and establish accountability.  

Patient experience leaders often lead through influence rather than formal authority. Executive sponsors help move a best practice from recommendation to organizational expectation.  

Just as important, sponsors need direction. Leaders should not assume that executives will automatically understand what support is required; experience leaders must define specific responsibilities and create a collaborative partnership from the beginning.  

As such, effective executive sponsors do more than endorse a project. They help create the structure, systems, accountability, and decision-making processes that allow a best practice to become embedded in daily operations.  

Gorley also encouraged leaders to communicate both the emotional and factual reasons for change. The emotional “why” connects the work to organizational values and the care people would want for their own loved ones. The factual “why” connects the work to outcomes, performance data, and organizational goals. Both are necessary to build commitment and sustain change. 

Before launching a major initiative, define what success looks like for the executive sponsor role and establish how experience leaders and executive leaders will support one another throughout implementation.  

Tactic #3: Evaluate readiness for the practice 

Organizations improve adoption when they assess readiness before implementation begins. Gorley noted that staffing challenges, leadership transitions, competing initiatives, and organizational instability can undermine even the strongest best practice.  

She also encouraged organizations to be selective about what they introduce. Based on her experience, when organizations attempt to implement more than two or three practices simultaneously, it becomes unlikely that all of them will stick. The most effective leaders prioritize high-impact practices and use data to guide those decisions. Gorley gave examples of high impact practices with data to back them up. For instance, 

Listening: Listening provides a powerful example. NRC Health research found that patients are 54% more likely to rate their experience at a 9 or 10 if they also say nurses listened carefully to them. And the connection between listening and trust is even stronger: NRC Health research found that patients are 267% more likely to report that they trust their care provider if they also report that those providers listen to them.  

Rounding: The same principle applies to rounding. NRC Health research found that patients are one and a half times more likely to rate their experience at a 9 or 10 if they were visited by a nurse leader. For organizations deciding which practices deserve attention first, findings like these help identify where improvement efforts can have the greatest impact. 

Gorley also highlighted NRC Health research defining what constitutes a quality round. A quality round includes resolving a concern; connecting with the patient through listening, explanation, and respect; and building trust by clarifying the plan of care and following through on commitments. These findings explain why some organizations have made listening a systemwide best practice, rather than treating it as an individual communication skill.  

An inventory of current initiatives can help leaders determine whether teams have the capacity to adopt another change. If multiple experience efforts are already underway, prioritizing those most closely tied to patient outcomes often delivers stronger results.  

Tactic #4: Co-design the practice

The people closest to the work are often those who are best positioned to determine how a best practice should operate in their environment. Gorley emphasized that teams should help adapt practices without compromising their intent.  

Co-design improves adoption because it gives frontline teams a voice in how change happens. Instead of imposing a process from above, leaders can draw on the expertise of the people who understand operational realities best.  

Gorley also encouraged organizations to plan for the realities that can derail implementation. Staffing shortages, seasonal volume surges, leadership changes, and competing priorities are not unexpected events—they’re part of healthcare operations. Practices are more likely to stick when implementation plans account for these challenges from the start.  

The bottom line: when people help design the work, they’re more invested in sustaining it. Co-design strengthens ownership, alignment, and long-term commitment to the practice.

Tactic #5: Make implementation fun 

One of the most memorable messages from the webinar was that implementing best practices doesn’t always have to feel serious. Gorley encouraged leaders to use contests, recognition programs, internal campaigns, fairs, awards, and peer celebrations to reinforce desired behaviors.  

She shared examples ranging from best-practice fairs to creative recognition campaigns that celebrate associates who go above and beyond for patients, families, and coworkers. These efforts create positive momentum while reinforcing organizational expectations. (And the topic resonated strongly with attendees, too. During a reflection exercise, participants repeatedly selected one question as the most meaningful: “Are you having fun?”)  

Healthcare leadership is demanding work—which is why energy, recognition, and connection matter. Recognition and celebration should be part of the entire implementation journey, not reserved for launch day. Small moments of encouragement can help reinforce the behaviors organizations want to sustain.  

The strongest patient experience programs are defined by their ability to make meaningful behaviors consistent across the organization.  

The five tactics Gorley shared—embracing resistance, identifying an executive sponsor, evaluating readiness, co-designing the practice, and making implementation fun—provide a practical framework for turning best practices into everyday habits.  

Leadership support, frontline engagement, listening, accountability, data, and Human Understanding can help transform good ideas into lasting improvement.  

Explore NRC Health’s Patient Experience Solutions to learn how Human Understanding helps healthcare organizations turn insight into action.