A NEW NATIONAL initiative launches for the first time today, seeking to get feedback from patients on their experience in hospital.
The National Patient Experience Survey asks 61 questions, ranging from the quality of the food and the toilets to how your diagnosis is explained to you and how staff respond to questions.
From now until the end of May, all adult patients discharged from a public acute hospital will be invited to participate in the survey.
It is anticipated that 27,000 patients will be eligible to participate. It will be open to any patient who has a postal address in Ireland and stayed in hospital for a minimum of 24 hours in the month of May.
Patients will receive the survey by post a few weeks after they are discharged, and can complete it online, or simply fill it out and send it back.
All responses are anonymous, with none of the staff involved in a patient’s care able to view that person’s responses.
The scheme was devised by the Health Information and Quality Authority (Hiqa), the Health Service Executive (HSE) and the Department of Health.
The trio hope to use the data collected from the survey to help shape future healthcare policy and improve outcomes for patients in public hospitals.
Rachel Flynn, Hiqa’s director of health information and programme director for the survey, said: “The importance of responding to this survey cannot be underestimated.
For the first time, we will be able to see from a patient’s perspective, not only examples of best practice in service delivery, but we can also identify areas for improvement.
Flynn urges everyone who receives a survey to complete it so that they could “enhance the quality and safety of care provided to patients in Ireland”.
The survey responses will be used to compile a reports on the experience of patients in Ireland. These reports will be published on the National Patient Experience Survey website.
A sample questionnaire can be found here.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say