About Us
Patient-Centeredness: Inpatient Satisfaction
Why is this measure important?
Each year, approximately 25,000 children are admitted to Children’s Hospital Boston. While it is critical that our patients receive the best medical care possible, it is also important that patients and families have the best possible experience while in our hospital. That’s why we have a program that asks parents to rate their child’s total hospital experience – everything from the quality of the food and the cleanliness of their room to the care provided by nurses.
How do we track this measure?
To measure parent satisfaction, we work with the National Research Corporation (NRC) and use their Picker Pediatric Inpatient Survey. The Picker survey is mailed to a random sample of parents whose children were discharged from Children’s the previous week. Approximately 1,200 parents receive the survey each quarter. Parents return the completed survey directly to NRC, which tabulates the results and sends them to us.
For this measure, we look at one question on the Picker survey (“Overall, how would you rate the care your child received at the hospital?”) to see how well we did. Our goal is to have 100% of parents rate their experience at our hospital as “excellent.”
How do we compare to other hospitals?
During the first and second quarters of 2010, 71.3% and 69.9% of parents rated their experience at Children’s as “excellent.” This is similar to the ratings we received from 2005-2009. These ratings are better than the average of all children’s hospitals in the country that use the Picker survey. However, they are lower than the ratings of the children’s hospitals that received the highest scores, and they do not meet our target of 100%.
What are we doing to improve?
We are doing a variety of things to improve patient and family satisfaction. Our Diversity and Culturally Competent Care Committee is working to improve satisfaction among families from diverse backgrounds. Three members of our staff have also completed a year-long disparities leadership program to improve care to these families.
We have developed and tested a program called Transforming Care at the Bedside, which is designed to improve direct nursing care to patients, and based on its success in improving parent satisfaction on one of our units, we are implementing it throughout the hospital.
Finally, we continue to closely monitor parent satisfaction results quarterly, and our Family-Centered Nursing Care Work Group meets monthly to develop new ways of improving the patient and family experience at Children’s.
