Introduction
Better healthcare results require the satisfaction of the patient. But how can a healthcare provider discover patient experience, and are their patients truly happy? So, the best way to figure this out is to get patient insights by doing patient surveys.
This article will answer the following questions: What is a patient satisfaction survey? What are the advantages of the different types of patient satisfaction surveys? What are some of the examples of a patient satisfaction survey? How do we create and use or analyze a patient satisfaction survey? Include a few questions in our patient satisfaction survey.
What is Patient Satisfaction?
Patient satisfaction refers to a patient’s happiness or contentment with their experience. They learned everything about the care: how good it was, how well they communicated with their medical professionals or doctors, how easy it was to get services, and the whole hospital or clinic experience.
So, what are Patient Satisfaction Surveys?
The patient satisfaction survey is a form with several questionnaires. It is used by healthcare businesses to grasp what the patients think and how satisfied they are with every aspect of healthcare.
Types of Patient Satisfaction Surveys
Depending on the healthcare services you provide and the feedback you are looking for, various survey formats may be used to gauge patient satisfaction. These are the two primary kinds:
-
Inpatient Satisfaction Surveys
People who are admitted to hospitals or other healthcare facilities to obtain treatment while remaining overnight or for an extended period are known as inpatients. The purpose of inpatient surveys is to get input from patients on their hospital experiences.
Inpatient surveys focus on different issues, including:
- Registration and admission process
- Treatment and medical care
- Cleanliness of the rooms
- Frequency of the doctors’ visit
- Behavior of the medical staff
- Billing and payment process
- Discharge process
-
Outpatient Satisfaction Surveys
Outpatients receive medical advice, treatment, or other related services from a clinic or hospital without staying there overnight. They return home the same day after treatment.
Feedback regarding consultations, diagnoses, treatments, and related services is gathered, and patients’ satisfaction with these is assessed using outpatient surveys that do not involve an overnight stay.
In outpatient surveys, questions are mostly related to:
- Appointment booking experience
- Waiting time for the appointment
- Interaction with the physician
- Availability of pharmacy and lab test services
- Satisfaction with the charges or fees
- Accessibility of the location of the clinic
- Comfort at the waiting room
- Cleanliness of the clinical surroundings
The Challenge of Crafting Effective Patient Satisfaction Surveys
Creating a patient satisfaction survey isn’t easy. You must consider many aspects to ensure your collected feedback is accurate, meaningful, and actionable. One of the most pressing challenges is ‘survey fatigue,’ i.e., respondents begin to disengage and answer hastily to compromise the data quality.
However, to avoid this, surveys need to be nuanced enough to maintain a comprehensive yet concise balance. However, if the patient is overloaded with multiple questions, they become fatigued, and if the survey is too simplistic, it lacks valuable insights.
A second common pitfall is asking ambiguous or multi-faceted questions, for example, instead of asking ‘How do you rate appointment scheduling and call wait times?’ which conveys two different things altogether to consolidate things. As these topics may differ from your opinion as a patient, there is no clear and accurate way of answering them. To avoid confusion and for reliable answers, the key is really to focus on one subject in one question.
When survey content is settled, the suitable means of delivery matter. Tech-savvy patients are involved in sending forms via email and even setting up surveys online via Survey Monkey to streamline the process and automate data analysis. Yet for patients who are less comfortable with technology, physical surveys given out during visits or sent in the mail to their homes may be more effective, at the expense of postage costs and manual data entry. Ultimately, it’s about your audience and removing barriers to engaging with the survey.
Conclusion
Patient Satisfaction surveys assist in improving the quality of care and experience that patients have. When healthcare organizations gather patient feedback using well-planned surveys, they can understand many things about their services. It covers how easy it is to make an appointment and how doctors and other medical staff treat patients. Besides this, it aids in drawing new patients by way of positive feedback from loyal patients and manages to call them back through good word of mouth and online reviews.
