Monday, January 29, 2007

They Will Never Guess It's Me

The local hospital, in an effort to improve the quality of its services, has sent out the survey form (click photo to enlarge) shown below. The cover letter states that the hospital "is committed to providing quality health care to each of our patients. The enclosed survey gives you an opportunity to express your views on a variety of patient related topic. Your information and ideas about quality improvement will help us be in a stronger position to render the highest quality service."

Then a couple of paragraphs down it says, "The survey will be administered anonymously and all responses will be kept completely confidential."

Now if you carefully study the questions in the Background Questions section you will see that if I do fill out this form and send it back there is no way anyone can find out I'm the one sending it back.

Question one- Date of visit.
This one I don't even have to answer since they have filled in the date and which department I visited.

Question two- Patient's first visit to our Outpatient Center
Answering that one should be OK.

Question three - Patient's sex
I see the need for this question, maybe men or women are being treated differently when they are there.

Question four- Patient's age
Again, checking to see if anyone is being treated differently but this time because of their age.

Question five- How many minutes did you wait after your scheduled appointment time...
Ok, checking to see if people are getting seen in a timely fashion.

Question six- How many minutes did you wait in the test or treatment area...
Again, checking to see if people getting seen in a timely fashion.

Question seven- On what day was your most recent visit?
Why are they asking that? They already know the last date I was there, they filled it in for me. Maybe they are trying to see if there is a problem only on certain days of the week.

Question eight- At what time of day was your most recent visit?
Again, maybe they are trying to see if there are problems only at certain times during the day.

I see nothing in my answers that would give them any idea of just who I am so I guess I will fill out the rest of this thing and send it back. Always happy to help my community.

No comments: