Being a Deputy Practice Manager in a busy 13,500 patient practice, I know all too well the daily stresses of keeping on top of the workload in general practice.
There seems to be a growing focus on patient involvement. With contractual requirements including Friends and Family Test and Patient Participation Groups, and CQC requirements to show you are responsive to your patients needs (for those who haven’t had their visit yet, they also ask to see the findings and action plans from patient surveys).
While I agree gaining patient engagement and opinions is key to making sure we are offering the best service we can; it wasn’t doing my ‘To Do’ list any favours. Not to mention the additional work for our Receptionists trying to persuade patients to complete the forms… there had to be an easier way!
Patient Satisfaction Questionnaire
We used the FourteenFish Patient Satisfaction Questionnaire; it was easy to set up, the questions are written for you and it didn’t cost a fortune. While you have the option of printing paper questionnaires for patients to complete and a member of your admin team to enter online, we decided to try the electronic approach.
We emailed the web link to all the patients with an email address recorded and posted it on our website and social media accounts. In less than 48 hours we had 227 responses, which was great! And all the results were collated and laid out in a simple graph report, even better.
All that was left to do was read through any comments that had been made, and there was an easy system to categorise them into the areas they related to.
It was fantastic, our response rate was better than ever and it had taken minimal admin time. I will definitely be doing this survey more often, which will make the outcomes and action plans so much more beneficial to our practice and our patients.
CQC
Everyone wants to do what they can to impress the CQC Inspectors, aiming high for that ‘oustanding’ rating. In my opinion, there’s no doubt that this helps to evidence that we are Responsive, Well-led, Effective and Caring... and I’ll find out if they agree in 12 days time!
