Patient Satisfaction Survey

In many cases, certain facets of a medical facility’s functioning remain unaddressed due to an infrequent collection of patient feedback and the sheer lack of information regarding those issues faced by patients while availing for consultation and treatment. This is where patient satisfaction surveys provide an effective platform for patients to provide an honest feedback, based on their experience. Let’s look at why conducting periodic patient satisfaction surveys are critical towards maintaining and growing your patient visitors. There are five reasons why you should conduct a patient satisfaction survey.

• Map and track a patient’s journey: It is important for a medical institute to keep track of their patient's satisfaction, based on the provided effective care. In order to ensure effective patient care at every point of significant interaction with the medical staff, and your institution at large, it is always recommended to conduct patient satisfaction surveys at multiple points of their journey. This enables you to track the points where satisfaction is low and remedy them.
• Gather data about the patient loyalty: Including a Net Promoter Score question: “Considering your complete experience with our medical facility, how likely would you be to recommend us to a friend or colleague?” - will help you understand how loyal your patients are as each patient will definitely talk to their friends and colleagues about their experience after they are done with their treatment.

  On the basis of their responses, patients will be divided into three categories: Promoters (9-10), Passives (7-8) and Detractors (0-6).

  In many cases, if patients have had a terrible experience (i.e. detractors) or a pleasant experience (i.e. promoters), they will definitely talk about the experience within their network of friends and colleagues. While a terrible experience will cause damage to your facility’s reputation, a pleasant experience will definitely be successful in building a positive reputation.

  Thus, hospital authorities should calculate their Net Promoter Score either at every patient journey touchpoint or towards the end of their treatment to constantly ensure that issues by detractive patients are addressed, efforts are made to convert passives into promoters and promoters are kept satisfied with each treatment experience.

• Report any ill-treatment by staff members: A patient satisfaction survey template promotes transparency by providing patients a medium to talk about any ill-treatment from hospital staff and bring it to the management’s notice. The management can take a step to either fire those staff members or train them to be respectful towards each and every patient who visits the medical facility.
• Effective patient care: By conducting a patient satisfaction survey, medical institutions can analyze the gap between patient demands and their provisions. Medical facilities can improve visibility into their operational efficiency, which can be used to bridge the identified gap.

  Every industry has become customer-centric, and the healthcare sector is no different. There are a considerable number of areas in a medical institution’s operations which need improvement and this is where learning from the customers directly becomes effective. Your hospital or healthcare organization can include questions about how you can serve the patients better to keep evolving according to the evolution happening in patient thoughts and opinions.

• Offer timely services to patients: 8 out of 10 medical authorities were of the opinion that they attended all their patients precisely at their respective appointment slots. Whereas, almost 50% of patients opined otherwise - they never get called in at their precise appointment time.
• Gain insights about hygiene levels: Hygiene levels of a hospital reflect on how well-maintained it is and there is a significant sample of patients who would prefer visiting a hospital offering clean and hygienic facilities. You can include questions regarding this aspect of the questionnaire.