Personally, from my own bedside experience, I do not feel that patients typically have a good understanding of how to judge the healthcare services they are being provided with. Primarily because of the recent focus on the Press-Ganey scores of hospitals. The focus has shifted not from the quality of the cares but whether the patients call light was answered quickly, and what the food tasted like. It is taking away from the importance of the actual cares that are provided, the monitoring, education, and life-saving treatments. Press-Ganey is the gold standard of evaluating a patient’s experience and it is a survey mailed to patients following their discharge (Cambria et al., 2019). Primarily the issue with this survey is that it doesn’t have a way to balance out bias or account for it. As is human nature we are likely to report and be more vocal on negative experiences versus that of positive responses. So, there are more people who reply to the survey that have had a negative experience in their hospital stay versus those that have had pleasant ones. A study that was done recently actually listed several limitations of such a survey in an inpatient hospital regarding the perceived care from physicians. It concluded that “patients perceived a doctor as more or less courteous, attentive, informative, or concerned with comfort due to factors beyond the doctor’s interactions. These results indicate variables other than the individual doctor that may be influencing the PG survey and perceptions of care” (Cambria et al., 2019, p.1620). Thus, proving there are more factors at play with bias and subjective perceptions of what quality care constitutes.
I think a lot of the misconceptions on what quality care is, comes from the ignorance the general public has when it comes to anything medical. I feel perhaps a bit biased myself because I worked on the side of providing the cares and know how much work goes into promoting healing, health, and safety. More education needs to be done for the patients on the stark reality providers face every day in giving care. Along with how different providers and health systems compare with their provision of healthcare services.
Some ways of improving the situation can come from being more transparent. An interesting article I found was studying ways to improve the quality of healthcare across the spectrum for all in the population. They were discussing that one such way to get this underway would be with releasing public reporting regarding care measures, outcomes, citations, never-events and more from hospitals (Metersky, 2011). This could be a strong motivation to improve care because no hospital or health system wants to see their poor outcomes, and poor-quality care measures in say the newspaper or website for all to see (Metersky, 2011).
They write that public reporting can improve the quality of care because of making the population more aware of the inner workings of each and every hospital and health-system. This will drive competition because to some degree, people do have a choice in where they go to receive their care. It will drive them to the hospitals with better results to report (Metersky, 2011). Thus, making the hospitals with lower quality rates and scores more inclined to adapt their ways in quality improvement.
Cambria, B., Basile, J., Youssef, E., Greenstein, J., Chacko, J., … & Ardolic, B. (2019). The effect of practice settings on individual Doctor Press Ganey scores: A retrospective cohort review. American Journal of Emergency Medicine, 37(9), 1618–1621. Retrieved from https://lopes.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edselp&AN=S0735675718309343&site=eds-live&scope=site
Metersky, M. (2011). Point: Will public reporting of health-care quality measures inform and educate patients? Yes. CHEST Journal, 140(5), 1115-1117. Retrieved from https://journal.chestnet.org/article/S0012-3692(11)60572-2/fulltext