About My Uber Eats Order

By Rose O. Sherman, EdD, RN, NEA-BC, FAAN

When I do workshops with leaders, I always listen carefully to the stories they tell me. So much has changed since I was at the bedside (and continues to change). Leaders have recently told me that when patients are dissatisfied with their hospital food today, they order from Uber Eats or Grub Hub. The patient pays for the food through a phone app, which is then delivered to the main desk. Patients expect their nurses to go downstairs and pick it up. This has become a common practice on both days and nights, especially in hospitals serving younger patients. In Australia, nursing associations are addressing the issues. Beth Mohle, secretary of the Queensland Nurses Union, said the deliveries were distracting and disruptive for nurses on duty.

With the current staffing challenges, this expectation seems unreasonable to the staff and their leaders. It does not add value to patient care; in some cases, patients eat food that does not comply with their diets. Some patient experience officers worry about their HCAHPS scores and patient comments. They urge the staff to try to meet these patient requests. One leader said she had recommended that volunteers provide this service if allowed. The response was that her staff is on the unit anyway, so why inconvenience another department? Historically, nurses did have more time to do personal things for patients and families, but not today.

Many leaders have shared similar stories. Some patients will openly threaten staff with poor patient experience scores if their demands are unmet. This type of behavior would have been unthinkable even five years ago. There is still little appreciation that the patient experience and the staff experience are closely linked. Stopping the work I am doing as a professional to pick up takeout should not be an expectation of nursing staff.

Hearing these stories was a good reminder that there is a high level of friction today in nursing work. Nurse Leaders who rely on their dated clinical experiences to make informed decisions cannot effectively respond to this new environment. Wise senior leaders are talking with their frontline leaders regularly to keep pace with the changes we see.

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