EVIDENCE-BASED PRACTICE PROJECT REPORT Submitted to the School of Nursing and Health Professions of Colorado Christian University Lakewood, Colorado in partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of DOCTOR OF NURSING PRACTICE Abstract Patient satisfaction is associated with patient care indicators and scoring that can impact healthcare reimbursement rates and a patient's likelihood to recommend the hospital to others (Press Ganey, 2019). Patient satisfaction is often determined by standardized surveys completed by third-party companies, such as Press Ganey. The community hospital where this evidence-based practice (EBP) project was implemented had an analysis completed that indicated “likelihood to recommend” is most closely correlated to a patient's perception of nursing communication during their hospital stay, which is a subset of patient satisfaction. The purpose of this project was to determine the impact of standardized nurse leader rounding (NLR) on patient satisfaction, under the domain of nursing communication. A thorough literature review on this topic yielded a total of 13 high-quality articles one level I, eight level II, three level III, and one level V evidence rating, based on The Johns Hopkins Nursing Evidence-Based Practice Guide, 2017. Best practice for nurse leader rounding was implemented in a Colorado community hospital. The implementation included thorough nurse leader education, the development of instruction sheets and a tracking log for leaders, handout cards for patients, and quality control observations by the project lead. It was found that the interventions did significantly improve the likelihood to recommend at 60 days postimplementation. Additionally, there was an overall improvement in scores for all three questions related to patient satisfaction. Keywords nurse leader rounding, patient satisfaction, HCAHPS, patient experience, communication