When using PubMed, a database of 24 million articles, make sure and go to the Woodruff Health Sciences Center Library’s homepage at http://health.library.emory.edu and click PubMed or use this direct link to Emory University’s instance of PubMed: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?otool=emorylib. When using Emory University’s instance of PubMed, you will be able to click the Find it at Emory button within entries for articles to determine if Emory has full-text access to articles.

Here are the broad search techniques I used:

1. (data collection OR consumer satisfaction OR outcome and process assessment OR healthcare quality assurance) AND ((marketing of health services AND professional-patient relations) OR (patients AND (ambassador OR ambassadors)) OR (sitter OR sitters) AND ambassador)))

Filter I used: English

2. (consumer satisfaction OR outcome and process assessment OR healthcare quality assurance) AND (volunteer[tiab] OR volunteers[tiab]) AND patients AND (acute OR hospital OR hospitals)

Filters I used: meta-analysis, review, systematic review, English; note that [tiab] finds articles in which the search term appears in the title or abstract of the article

Please paste the following search into PubMed to see 10 articles that appear to be useful that were found with the aforementioned broad searches:

17057604[uid] OR 12465218[uid] OR 11951690[uid] OR 10169030[uid] OR 7896552[uid] OR 10124795[uid] OR 10124795[uid] OR 12569993[uid] OR 3648555[uid] OR 11129764[uid] OR 20464736[uid]

The only article of the 10 that specifically mentions ambassadors is entitled “Integrating palliative medicine….” Two other articles mention volunteers, and other articles provide ideas on how employees can effectively market services to patients. There are numerous other articles on using employees to market services; a different search technique would need to be created to find all of them. I included the article on negative emotion evaluations because patient ambassadors are responsible for addressing patients’ nonclinical needs (their actions thus primarily affect patients’ emotions).