What should be included in patient satisfaction survey? Do you remember the last time you noticed how your practice going on with your patients. Guess it’s been a while. You may think it is not compulsory, however, the patient satisfaction surveys are crucial to identify what the good things and/or areas are in your practice and what should be improved in your and/or other’s practice to achieve better patient satisfaction. The results of the customer care surveys give you the sense of how patients review your quaity in healthcare, performance of the healthcare staff, whether your communication about the appointments is satisfactory and the other areas of the practice.
According to the ongoing consumer driven market, ad the rising supermarket, retail, and pharmacy clinics on the rise, the competition among physicians have become higher. Therefore, it’s your job to ensure your patient’s satisfaction. The patients can directly refer your service to their family, relations, friends and to anybody in the community if you are able to provide a higher patient satisfaction. Medical practice is also a business such as other businesses, therefore, marketing is also important in medical practices. Let your patients to spread the good about you, ultimately, it will lead to attract new patients to you.
What should be included in patient satisfaction survey
Determine the aspects you need to be surveyed. Those aspects should meet your objectives and goals throughout the survey, and the aspects should be useful to improve your practice. Otherwise it will be a waste of time of you as well as the patients. For an instance,if you are concentrating on the waiting time of the cusatomers or the parking availability, stick with these aspects throughout the survey.
Prepare a questionaire with specific question that meet your objectives and goals. In order to have detailed answers,set some questions as open-ended questions. ‘Yes’, ‘No’ or ranking answers are easy to evaluate but less useful and limited capacity to establish or improve the ongoing practice.
Use simple and direct questions avoiding assumption of knowledge. Make each question is understandable to every patient, do not make question that the answers get biased by the personnel view of each patient. Make sure your way of communication with the patients is effective.
Use short, clear and concise questions. It make easy to read and easy to understand by the patients. No one has the patience to go throughout a long question to completely understand the question and answer it for the survey.
Make the surey anonymous. People may twice before telling the truth, if you ask for the detail of the patient. Making them anonymous is helpful to reveal the truth.
Concentrate on your target market and make appropiate questions as the survey delivery be a better one with better results. Consider the patient skills and preferences when considering the delivery method.
Never forget, there will be a small percentage who will react by giving purposely false answers or answer dishonestly. That cannot be avoided or cannot be distinguishable with the right answers. Consider that in mind while reviewing the overall results.
Review and evaluate the responses. Short answer questions and online surveys make evaluation easier, however, it takes time to truly review the responses such as open ended questions. After reviewing, discuss with your staff about the solutions you can made, however, a respondent has mentioned about particular staff memeber, discuss that issue with the relevant staff meber privately.
Finnally, your patients will look forward to see the improvements or the changes. After reviewing, make sure to take the appropiate actions quickly and effectively as the patients notice the improvements. You can share the improvements in your practice newsletter, or on your website or Facebook page (see this article for The Right Way To Do Medical Practice Marketing). Patients love to be get honoured, if they feel that you have listened to them, they will feel appreciated.
A patient satisfaction survey is a wonderful thing to evaluate your practice and to improve your practice.
