FEATURE Reaching Out
ASCs find new ways to develop useful patient satisfaction surveys and encourage patient response. BY SAHELY MUKERJI
A
t Hyde Park Surgery Center in Austin, Texas, Jami Osterlund,
RN, administrative director, says the patient survey response rate at her cen- ter was less than 10 percent until Janu- ary 2012. “We wanted to improve it to 50 percent for the first quarter. The quality assurance team met and we identified areas of improvement, such as emphasizing the importance of feed- back in the recovery room area, asking patients during the post-op phone call if they had completed and returned the survey, installing a suggestion box for patients to use to submit the survey, and changing the color of the paper that the survey was printed on from white to green so it didn’t get mixed up with the other discharge papers.” After putting all of those ideas in
place, the return rate jumped to 59 per- cent in February, Osterlund says, and in March the rate was 52 percent. “We re-evaluated the measures in April and realized that the pain patients—our repeat patients—were not getting sur- veyed,” she says. Once those patients were included, in May, the return rate went up to 94 percent. “Since May, we’ve been consistently getting 90 per- cent or better rates.” Staff education and staff participa- tion are primarily responsible for this jump in return rates, Osterlund says, but getting the physicians on board also helped. “I explained the rationale
for needing the feedback from the pa- tients to the physicians, typed up the patient comments and put them up in the break room.” The higher return rate has “made things more efficient and helped us identify areas that we needed to im- prove,” Osterlund says. “We made improvements in areas that were get- ting poor scores, such as discharge in- structions and nurses not introducing themselves.”
had a 30 percent return rate about a year back with one-third of the surveys being returned, but since the change, the rate has doubled to 50 percent to 60 percent on average.” Once the surveys are in, the cen-
ter staff call the patients surveyed and ask what they could do to improve anything on which they were rated poorly. “Our rating system is not num- bers,” Cole says. “It’s ‘strongly agree,’ ‘agree,’ ‘disagree’ and ‘strongly dis- agree.’ If anything is not ‘strongly agree,’ we call and ask about the issue and get their suggestion to improve. One said it was hard to put on street clothes after the injection and a little help would be appreciated. Another
The quality assurance team met and we identified areas of improvement, such as emphasis on the importance of feedback in the recovery room area ….”
—Jami Osterlund, RN, Hyde Park Surgery Center Like Osterlund, Evalyn Cole, CASC,
chief executive officer and adminis- trator of the Spine Surgery Center of Eugene LLC in Eugene, Oregon, also sought an increased response rate. “We tried to make the survey quick
and easy,” Cole says. “My research showed that if the patients couldn’t fill it in in 20 seconds or less, they wouldn’t do it.” The survey was in multiple-choice format and patients who completed and returned it got a $5 Starbucks card. “That pretty much doubled our returns,” Cole says. “We
PUBLIC OPINION SURVEY
Fifty-five percent of respondents prefer a physician who owns and supervises his or her own practice as opposed to a physician employed by a hospital. Source: Survey of 800 voters conducted June 25–27, 2012, by Public Opinion Strategies
34 ASC FOCUS JANUARY 2013
pointed out that a certified nurse as- sistant (CNA) wasn’t wearing
name tag. So we went back and pulled the name of the CNA who helped her and made sure that she knew to wear her name badge.”
At their quality assurance meeting,
the staff report the number of surger- ies and the number of surveys returned and discuss the comments, Cole says. “It’s been positive feedback for us and we have made several changes to little things based on patient comments,” Cole says.
her
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