Patient Surveys

Irish Society for Quality & Safety in Healthcare 

The society is a not-for-profit, charitable, non-governmental organisation dedicated to improving the quality and safety of healthcare and supporting the development of professionals in healthcare quality through professional education, training and research. 

The challenge.

In this role the ISQSH is responsible for administering the National Patient Perception of the Quality of Healthcare Survey. The Society needed to provide a quick and effective way to survey discharged patients from acute hospitals in order to examine key quality aspects of in-patient care. The ISQSH, recognising that patient satisfaction is best viewed and measured as a multi-dimensional concept, have purchased KeyPoint to design and manage their patient surveys.

They require high response rates from the surveys, which have proved difficult to obtain in the past. High returns are crucial in order to produce reliable feedback and provide opportunities for learning and improvement across the Irish health sector. Previous research projects have used telephone interviews (CATI) to collect information from discharged patients, however this survey technique is open to bias and can present problems with patients’ confidentiality.

Why KeyPoint.

After an extensive review of survey software, the ISQSH decided to purchase KeyPoint. In contrast to other packages it provided a user-friendly interface for the design and management of patient surveys. This, coupled with its ability to be utilised on the web, as well as its comprehensive data analysis tools, made it the ideal choice.

The results.

The Web & Email module has made it easier to create and distribute high impact patient surveys on the internet, allowing the ISQSH to meet a much wider audience than they could with traditional printed surveys. KeyPoint has therefore helped improve the quality and quantity of the responses received, making the end results more meaningful.

Furthermore, by using KeyPoint, they are able to create different versions of the same survey: paper, email or web surveys at the same time and then analyse them together using the multiple forms facility. This way they are able to offer patients a choice of how they would prefer to provide their feedback, which in turn has produced very high response rates.

KeyPoint has also enabled the Society to capture feedback in a structured manner, offering patients the opportunity to report upon their perception of the quality and care they received and the hospital with information to improve their service. The design tool allowed them to incorporate several question styles into one survey e.g. Likert Scales, multiple-choice and open-ended questions, as well as yes/no choices.

Major successes.

The Society has conducted national surveys of the perception of patients (in public and private hospitals throughout Ireland) on the care and treatment they received whilst in hospital. The projects have large sample sizes, often up to 6000 patients per participating hospital.

The future.

The software is central to all areas for research and audits carried out by the Irish Society for Quality & Safety in Healthcare and they intend for this to continue in the future.

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