Patient Experience for Consumers

If you have recently stayed in a hospital or received care at other healthcare services, you might be sent a survey to find out about your experiences during your treatment. The survey might include the Australian Hospital Patient Experience Question Set (AHPEQS).

The hospital or healthcare service has sent you this survey because they want to know from patients what is working well or poorly in their services. As a patient, you can see signs of high or poor quality that may not be seen by staff. Communicating this unique perspective to healthcare workers and the people who run health service organisations is vital for them to understand how to make their services better and safer for patients. In fact, inquiries into poor care have found that patients and their carers often spot safety problems before anyone else, and need to be listened to when they raise concerns.

When you have been a patient in a hospital or other healthcare service, you may be asked after you have left, or just before you leave, to complete a survey. This request might be from the service or hospital or from a private health insurance fund that want to know about your experiences so that they can improve services.

The request might also be from the government. Your state, territory or federal health department might conduct surveys to find out how healthcare services in your area are performing.

If you have received a patient experience survey and suspect it might be a scam, there are a few things you can do:

• If you have not had a recent experience (within the past few months) of the service the survey claims to be asking about, do not respond to the survey
• Genuine patient experience surveys will never ask you for financial information or for details about your medical condition or treatments
• If you are worried, contact the hospital, health service, government or health insurance fund which is named on the survey, to ask if they have in fact sent a survey to you. 

Your observations and experiences will help to improve how your healthcare service takes care of patients. The survey only takes a small amount of time but it can have a big impact on improving health care for you, your family and loved ones, and everyone in the community.

Most Australians will need hospital or health care at some time during their lives. Patients’ experience of care should be the best that the hospital or service can provide. Research shows that good experiences in hospital can actually help patients to have better health outcomes from their treatment.

Your feedback ensures that patients’ voices are heard. It is important that hospitals understand what ‘good care’ means to patients and exactly what patients experience during their care. By asking patients about their experience, hospitals and healthcare services can find out what improvements they need to make. This will mean that the care they provide in the future is what patients want and need.

Your answers will be used by hospitals and healthcare services to develop strategies to improve patient treatment and care.

Patient experience information will be discussed at management meetings and with service staff to raise awareness of how patients feel and what is important to them, and what can be done to improve the patient experience. The hospital or healthcare service will also use the information to develop strategies to improve specific areas. For example, if survey responses from several patients show that there are problems with communication between health professionals and patients, they may set up a training program to remind staff of best practice.

The survey might also include questions about age, gender, ethnicity and language. This helps the hospital or healthcare service to understand and improve the experiences of specific groups of patients. For example, older patients may need more help than younger patients, or patients with English as a second language may need more help to be involved in decision-making.

The survey data might also be used by state, territory or federal health departments and health insurance funds to understand the performance of the services they fund.

Your answers will make a real difference to how hospitals and healthcare services care for their patients. Hospitals and healthcare services can tell whether the service they provide is working well, by looking at patient experience data. But only you can tell them how you were treated while you were in hospital – were you cared for and supported as you wanted, did you feel safe, did you experience any harm or distress, did staff talk with you about your treatment, and did you understand and agree with what was happening.

Care and support is just as important to your health as treatment, and your answers will be directly used to improve those areas.

If you are interested in finding out more about how your hospital or healthcare service is using your feedback, they may have information available on their website, or you can ask them directly.

A survey is just one way of providing positive or negative feedback about your experiences in a hospital or healthcare service.

When you are contacted about the survey, the invitation should tell you who to contact if you have a question or if you decide there is something else you wish to discuss.

Your hospital or healthcare service should also have provided you with information about how to make a complaint or give a compliment about your treatment or care, and information will be available on the organisation’s website. Hospitals and healthcare services generally have someone who receives and acts on patient feedback (for example, a consumer liaison officer, safety and quality officer, or complaints officer).

You can also contact other organisations, such as your local consumer association, state or territory health care complaints commission or health ombudsman, or the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency.

See Information about healthcare complaints for guidance on the complaints process, including links to where you can make a complaint in Australia.

You will not necessarily get an answer to your feedback, though the hospital or healthcare service might respond to thank you for your time. If you have asked (as part of your survey response) to be contacted about a concern or complaint, you will need to provide your name and contact details, and the hospital or healthcare service should contact you directly.

You can provide one-off or ongoing feedback to help to improve hospital and healthcare services.

If you would like to provide feedback on what it is like to be a patient or what improvements could be made to patient care, you should contact your hospital or healthcare service and speak to the relevant staff member.

You can also get involved in broader hospital or health care service processes that engage consumers in making change. Some organisations have patient advisory panels or consumer councils for this purpose.

Some healthcare services use survey responses from a large number of patients to identify and investigate concerning patterns which may show a safety or quality problem. As part of this process, they may ask for consumer volunteers to take part in focus groups to better understand the reasons behind these patterns of responses.

In some health service organisations, consumers can be involved in committees that assess complaints and improvements. Public hospitals, for example, must have consumer advisory committees, which report to the health service board. Hospitals like to have a diversity of consumers involved so that they can gain an in-depth understanding of consumer needs and experiences.

If you would like to find out more about how patient experience is used at your local hospital or healthcare service, they may have information or reports on their website, or you can contact the organisation directly.