The ANQ (Swiss National Association for Quality Development in Hospitals and Clinics) has been conducting annual satisfaction surveys for inpatients in acute care settings since 2011. Within a few years, similar surveys were developed and implemented in other settings, for parents of hospitalized children in acute hospitals, adult inpatients in rehabilitation and in psychiatric clinics. The implementation of patient surveys is a mandatory component of the National Measurement Plan to promote and maintain the quality of care in Swiss hospitals. The ANQ surveys are very brief and actually carried out once every two years during one to three months. The findings are used for monitoring temporal changes, for benchmarking among providers and are published in a transparent way to inform the public. However, the usefulness of these results for quality improvement in hospitals is somewhat limited because the selected questions are of a general nature and not suitable to identify precisely potential areas for improvement, a near real-time analysis is not possible and the limited collection period reduces the sample size for small hospital sites. Therefore, hospitals and clinics who would like to monitor and improve patient care have to carry out their own surveys.
The purpose of this brief survey among Swiss hospitals and clinics was to make an inventory of existing satisfaction/care experiences surveys, to find out which instruments are used, which methods are applied, and how the findings of the surveys are used to improve inpatient care.