Patient experience
People receiving care have a unique perspective on the day-to-day running of a health service and how it affects them. Measuring patient experience gives health professionals important insights to improve services and provide person-centred care.
Why measuring patient experience matters
Patients, their families and carers have unique insights and are often the first to notice poor or unsafe practices.
Measuring their experience allows health professionals to see things from the patient perspective and uncover problems that may otherwise go unnoticed.
Health professionals can then use this feedback to introduce better safety and quality measures, improve systems and processes, and provide better person-centred care.
Research shows health services with more positive patient experiences often have lower readmission rates, shorter lengths of stay, fewer hospital-acquired complications and fewer serious safety events.
Measuring patient experience
Patient experience can be measured systematically through validated patient-reported experience measures (PREMs), and qualitatively through patient stories, focus groups and interviews.
Regardless of the method for measuring patient experience, it’s important that results lead to actions and are reported back to participants.
Patient experience is one component of care we can measure. We also have indicators for measuring patient safety culture, complications acquired while in hospital, and serious in-hospital incidents.
Our national safety and quality standards also emphasise the importance of patient experience feedback.
Patient-reported experience measures
Patient-reported experience measures (PREMs) are questionnaires, such as the Australian Hospital Patient Experience Questionnaire Set, that systematically capture a patient’s experience receiving treatment and care.
This can include questions about whether the patient felt cared for, if information was easy to access, and their perspective on different interactions they had. PREMs are typically used to capture one-off patient experiences in health care settings.
Our guide to implementing PREMs into practice supports health professionals through the three stages of implementing PREMs.
PREMs are different from patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) in that PREMs measure a patient’s experience when receiving care and PROMs measure the outcomes.
Australian Hospital Patient Experience Questionnaire Set
The Australian Hospital Patient Experience Questionnaire Setis a free set of survey questions for hospitals and health services to ask recent patients about their experience.
The set was developed and tested based on what’s important and meaningful to patients and can be used to investigate any service issues from the patient’s perspective.
We have two sets available:
- The Australian Hospital Patient Experience Questionnaire Set
- The Australian Hospital Patient Experience Questionnaire Set for parents and carers
Each set can be used alone or alongside existing patient surveys, at any level of health service delivery and across any state or territory and health setting.
The sets are available in a range of languages and our technical specifications offers guidance to facilitate the survey consistently and collate responses.
Some Australian states and territories may have different PREMs and patient experience measures.
State and territory patient-reported experience measures
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| Queensland |
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| Victoria |
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Patient stories
Patient stories provide detailed feedback of a person’s experience with health care in the context of their own lives.
They help to understand how a patient’s personal circumstances influence the kind of care they want or need and how their health outcomes were impacted by their own personal circumstances.
Patient stories are important lessons in providing person-centred care that values and considers a patient’s personal circumstance and perspectives.
Focus groups
Focus groups use discussions from groups of people to gain collective feedback and insights.
They are useful for generating a consensus rather than a diversity of opinions, are flexible and can include a certain group of people with specific experiences or a mix of experiences, are less time intensive than one-on-one interviews and are cost effective.
The Agency for Clinical Innovation’s facilitation guide on participant experience focus groups provides information and guidance to run successful focus groups.
Interviews
Interviews can be used to gather structured one-on-one feedback or to assist patients to complete PREMs. Interviews can be face-to-face or use methods such as Computer Assisted Telephone Interviews (CATI).
Interviews are useful in reaching specific priority populations such as people from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds, First nations people and paediatric patients.
Patient experience measurement in primary health care
In 2023, we researched how patient experience is measured in primary health care. This literature review explains what’s happening in Australia and other countries when it comes to collecting and using patient feedback. The review outlines the key challenges that need to be solved before patient experience information can be used effectively to improve the quality of primary health care in Australia.
Patient Reported Indicator Survey (PaRIS)
The Patient-Reported Indicator Survey (PaRIS) was an international initiative in the primary health care setting that used PREMs and PROMs to measures the experiences and outcomes of patients living with a chronic illness.