It's time to focus the conversation: patient surveys are only as actionable as the questions you ask.
While we always want a patient to be satisfied with his or her experience, we now know it's more important that they experience caregiver behaviors designed to help them help, to get healthier and have a better quality of care experience.
NRC Picker's patient experience family of surveys are based on the Eight Dimensions of Patient-Centered Care - behaviors designed to improve patient care - as established through research with Harvard University and the Picker Institute. By measuring whether or not these critical behaviors were experienced by the patient, our family of surveys provide a clear path, a measurable path, for quality improvement.
Data provided by a patient satisfaction survey offers limited guidance on what can be done to improve your organization's performance.
For example:
How satisfied were you with the instructions given about how to care for yourself at home?
Very Good (53%)
Good (22%)
Fair (14%)
Poor (9%)
Very Poor (2%)
Very little actionable information can be gleaned from this item. We don’t know if enough information was provided to the patient or if important information was missing. Likewise, we don’t know if the information was provided, but misunderstood.
Looking at a behavioral-based question from NRC Picker’s HCAHPS Picker Plus survey, we can see a difference in that it is measuring the most important part of the patient’s experience – and how well caregivers engaged in behaviors supporting it.
If you had any anxieties or fear about your condition or treatment, did a nurse discuss them with you?
Always (42%)
Usually (29%)
Sometimes (11%)
Never (18%)
The good news is that 42% of the patients received best practice behaviors. Just a little more than half of your patients would have benefited from improved training of and communication from caregivers. The challenging number is that nearly one fifth of your patients received no patient-centered care.
Is that acceptable?
Hopefully, it’s not. And that’s why you’re using – or considering using – behavior-based questions. To help your caregivers create “always” behaviors for your patients.
This question represents the Emotional Support dimension of patient-centered care. Research shows that Emotional Support is the dimension most highly correlated with the “Overall Quality” and “Likelihood to Recommend” HCAHPS questions. Learn more…