Feb 15, 2023
Health care managers and providers in Saskatchewan have a new tool for collecting feedback from people accessing mental health or addiction services as outpatients. The Health Quality Council (HQC), in collaboration with health system partners and patient/family advisors, has developed a 28-question survey intended as an aid to understanding the experience of clients receiving care in these settings.
Patient experience surveying gives health care providers feedback on the care they are providing to patients. It can be used to identify areas for improvement or to assess whether changes to care process have in fact made things better for patients.
“Patients have valuable insights to share when we give them the opportunity. Surveying them about their care experiences is one tool we have to collect this important feedback.” (Patrick Falastein, HQC’s Director of Health System Planning and Reporting)
The new survey has been designed to provide useful information for point of care managers and staff. Care providers sometimes know where improvements need to be made; however, unless people receiving care are asked, opportunities for improvement can be missed.
The Mental Health and Addictions Services OutPatient Survey is available on the HQC website, along with a data analyzer tool and patient surveying toolkit. The analyzer tool makes it easy to create graphs for displaying survey results. The toolkit is a step-by-step, how-to guide that contains many tools and examples from across the province.
One of HQC’s strategic priorities is to measure health care outcomes and processes to generate evidence for decision making. We work with the Ministry of Health and health organizations to design better measurement of health system quality, safety, and performance, and provide training on how to most effectively display, interpret, and use data. Other surveys we’ve developed with our health system partners include
- Acute care unit-level survey;
- Primary health care survey; and,
- Long-term care survey.
