Hospital Patient Care Surveys -
[Cached Version]
Published on: 12/22/2001
Last Visited: 1/3/2007
Wexham Park Hospital brought a new meaning to the phrase "a ten-minute survey" when Jane Hartley, its Head of Clinical Governance Development, managed to set-up an overlooked feedback survey from scratch, and get the copies distributed, all in a record-breaking ten minutes, thanks to Snap.
Jane and her ten-strong team, five of whom specialize in clinical audit and the others in clinical research, make extensive use of Snap to design a wide range of surveys among patients and the hospital's medical and support staff, though usually to more manageable timescales.Many of these surveys are also scanned, using Snap scan to drive an optical character recognition scanner.
"Even if we are not going to scan a particular survey, we will still do the formatting in Snap," says Jane, citing the speed of the set-up and the professionalism of the survey form created as providing major advantages over using a word processor.
Jane also makes Snap available to others in the hospital that have a need to do surveys, such as for national audits and nationally funded clinical research programmes, or career-based research that doctors are carrying out."We encourage that those running the study use Snap and do the keying in themselves,"
Jane also makes Snap available to others in the hospital that have a need to do surveys, such as for national audits and nationally funded clinical research programmes, or career-based research that doctors are carrying out."We encourage that those running the study use Snap and do the keying in themselves," Jane explained."We give them support, and help them out if they get stuck, but they quickly learn how to use the software: it's very simple to use."One recent study into transport had a sample of 2,000, so the person running that study was also taught to use the scanner.Jane advises anyone considering installing Snap to take some training first."It was well worth it.It does not long to learn the questionnaires.Four of us went for a day's training, because you need more than one person.Since then, we've been able to pass our knowledge on."
For scanning, Jane strongly advises giving someone the time to learn it properly."It is not trivial: you probably need to devote a week over the period of a month to succeed.It is in the nature of scanning that there will be issues to resolve and you need someone who can pursue these," Jane reports."The Snap HelpDesk are always very helpful, but it is not something where you can go on a one-day course then not use it for three months."
Snap has also removed two other major constraints on the survey process and ultimately the value of the results achieved.Jane encourages researchers to pilot or test their surveys on a very small sample.The ease and speed with which questionnaires can be revised in Snap means researchers are much more inclined to make radical changes to their questionnaires after the pilot, something Jane observes researchers were often "loath to do when designing it in Word or on paper."
The ability to scan means surveys can be constructed with much larger sample sizes."We know we can cope with hundreds of forms without feeling daunted," says Jane.
It has encouraged the team to consider bringing in house one large, annual survey of patients which is currently conducted by a research agency at some cost.In addition, Jane and her team will be able to get much more from the data, by having direct access for the first time."We would not contemplate this without something like Snap," Jane remarks.
The remarkable ten-minute survey, something else Jane never contemplated, occurred at a 100-strong conference she was attending at the hospital.She looked in the delegate pack as the speaker was urging the audience to complete the feedback form to realize, with horror, there wasn't one: it had been overlooked.
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