It's all about 'real time' feedback
The Department of Health's recent report encourages PCTs and community care providers to capture patient satisfaction feedback in 'real time' to supplement the GP Patient Survey.
In September 2008, Secretary of State for Health Alan Johnson said he wanted to see NHS Trusts collecting and using “immediate feedback from patients on their experience of care” in order to drive service improvement.
The guide published by the Department of Health in May 2009, ‘Understanding what matters; A guide to using patient feedback to transform services’, sets out best practice in this field. All hospitals will be expected to start using, or extend the use of, near real-time techniques to collect patient experience feedback in 2009, and demonstrate that they are using this feedback to improve services. The report says,
”Although the current focus is on hospitals, PCTs should consider widening their plans to include primary and community care settings, where this has not already started”.
The report advises that when collecting 'real time' patient satisfaction information, experience-based feedback is much more useful than the polling of general satisfaction with the NHS - the latter of which ”rarely provides intelligence that can be acted upon to achieve change”, and is also unreliable in capturing change over time. The report recommends patients are asked specifically about their own direct experience of services, rather than about their general satisfaction. PatientPulse has been designed to capture experience-based satisfaction scores.
The report also says that imperfect information is better than no information, when measuring patient satisfaction for the purposes fo making improvements as opposed to measurement for research purposes or for judging performance. This means there is no pressure for real time feedback to be totally representative of the patient population, if it is used for identifying areas for improvement and measuring those improvements.
PatientPulse is a good way of supplementing the GP Patient Survey with high volume, 'real time' information that can be used for practical purposes - identifying strengths and weaknesses and tracking changes.
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