It takes patience and persistence to get negative feedback about patients’ experiences: a secondary analysis of national inpatient survey data

Barron, David N., West, Elizabeth, Reeves, Rachel and Hawkes, Denise (2014) It takes patience and persistence to get negative feedback about patients’ experiences: a secondary analysis of national inpatient survey data. BMC Health Services Research, 14:153. ISSN 1472-6963 (Print), 1472-6963 (Online) (doi:10.1186/1472-6963-14-153)

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Abstract

Background

Patient experience surveys are increasingly used to gain information about the quality of healthcare. This paper investigates whether patients who respond before and after reminders to a large national survey of inpatient experience differ in systematic ways in how they evaluate the care they received.

Methods

The English national inpatient survey of 2009 obtained data from just under 70,000 patients. We used ordinal logistic regression to analyse their evaluations of the quality of their care in relation to whether or not they had received a reminder before they responded.

Results

33% of patients responded after the first questionnaire, a further 9% after the first reminder, and a further 10% after the second reminder. Evaluations were less positive among people who responded only after a reminder and lower still among those who needed a second reminder.

Conclusions

Quality improvement efforts depend on having accurate data and negative evaluations of care received in healthcare settings are particularly valuable. This study shows that there is a relationship between the time taken to respond and patients’ evaluations of the care they received, with early responders being more likely to give positive evaluations. This suggests that bias towards positive evaluations could be introduced if the time allowed for patients to respond is truncated or if reminders are omitted.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Patient satisfaction/statistics and numerical data – Hospitals/standards – Health care surveys/methods – Bias (epidemiology) – Questionnaires
Subjects:	R Medicine > RT Nursing
Faculty / Department / Research Groups:	Faculty of Education & Health Faculty of Education & Health > Department of Psychology, Social Work & Counselling
Last Modified:	26 Apr 2017 13:56
URI:	http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/13548

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