The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety
A Mixed-Methods Analysis of Patient Reviews of Hospital Care in England: Implications for Public Reporting of Health Care Quality Data in the United States
Section snippets
Hospital Inclusion Criteria and Characteristics
We identified all hospitals that provide general or subspecialty medical care registered on the NHS Choices website on the index date of August 25, 2010. From this list, we excluded psychiatric, dental, and homoeopathic hospitals. We examined each included hospital for the presence of patient reviews and excluded hospitals with fewer than 10 reviews to obtain a representative sample of hospitals with a sufficient number of reviews. We recorded characteristics of included hospitals using the NHS
Hospital Characteristics
As of the index date, there were 1,084 NHS hospitals in England listed on the NHS Choices website. Of these, we excluded 2 dental and 1 homeopathic hospital, as well as 817 hospitals for which there were fewer than 10 reviews. The final sample consisted of 264 hospitals (Table 1, right). Eligible hospitals had a mean of 34 reviews between the introduction of NHS Choices in 2008 and the index date. The maximum number of reviews for a single hospital was 160. Hospitals were from all regions of
Discussion
NHS Choices is the first government-run website to give patients the opportunity to post narrative reviews about the care they receive within hospitals. In this study, we found that many patients take advantage of the opportunity to complete survey questions and post narrative reviews. Some hospitals had more than 100 posted reviews, but only 264 hospitals—a minority of all hospitals (24%)—had accumulated 10 patient reviews by the study’s index date. The majority of patients’ responses to
Conclusions
NHS Choices represents the first government-run opportunity for patients to provide narrative feedback about hospitals. Our findings also suggest that narrative reviews, combined with systematically collected patient experience data, could provide useful and complementary information to consumers and hospitals. Although there may be some challenges to implementing such a website in the United States, adding a similar feature to Hospital Compare could increase available information about patient
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