What is AHPEQS

The Australian Hospital Patient Experience Question Set (AHPEQS) is a tool with 12 questions that patients answer. The questions assess the quality of their experiences during a recent hospital stay or visit to a healthcare service. 

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A tool for measuring patient experience

Measuring patient experience is different to measuring patient satisfaction. Satisfaction is how patients felt about the events, while experience is about the events themselves – what happened and how often. AHPEQS focuses on events and experiences that are relevant to most patients in most types of health care.

Patients have a unique perspective on the day-to-day running of a health service and how this affects them. Finding out what patients experienced during their treatment and care can help hospitals and healthcare providers to improve their services. The information collected from AHPEQS allows hospitals and healthcare services to identify where they could improve and how they might change.

Hospitals and healthcare services can ask patients to complete AHPEQS in several ways: online, with pen and paper, over the telephone or using tablet devices. AHPEQS can be used alone or as part of other patient surveys.

AHPEQS and current terms and conditions of use

Australian Hospital Patient Experience Question Set

The AHPEQS questions ask patients to consider short statements about events that occur during health care. These are events that consumers told us are important to their experience of health care.

The statements are worded from the patient’s perspective. The patient marks one response which best reflects how often the statement was true during their most recent healthcare experience.

Most questions give the option of answering ‘always’, ‘mostly’, ‘sometimes’, ‘rarely’ or ‘never’.

  1. My views and concerns were listened to
  2. My individual needs were met
  3. When a need could not be met, staff explained why (applies only if Question 2 was answered negatively)
  4. I felt cared for
  5. I was involved as much as I wanted in making decisions about my treatment and care
  6. I was kept informed as much as I wanted about my treatment and care
  7. It was clear to me that staff had communicated with each other about my treatment and care
  8. I received pain relief that met my needs
  9. When I was in hospital I felt confident in the safety of my treatment and care
  10. I experienced unexpected harm or distress as a result of my treatment and care
  11. My harm or distress was discussed with me by staff (applies only if Question 10 was answered in the affirmative)
  12. Overall, the quality of treatment and care I received was (very good, good …)
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