Healthcare Areas
Also in this section
- Primary Healthcare
- Clinical care
- Delivery of care
- Patient experience
- Patients’ experience with family doctors’ listening
- Patients’ rating of family doctor’s explanations
- Patients’ experience with appointment length
- Patients’ experience with family doctor’s respect
- Patients’ experiences with their doctor involving them in care decisions
- Patient experience with care coordination
- Patient experience with family doctor availability
- Patients’ overall experience with their family doctor
- Emergency Department
- Wait times
- EMS response time for life-threatening events
- Time spent by EMS at hospital
- Patient time to see an emergency doctor
- Patient emergency department total length of stay (LOS)
- Length of time emergency department patients wait for a hospital bed after a decision to admit
- Time to get X-ray completed
- Emergency department volumes
- Delivery of care
- Hospital patients who require an alternate level of care
- Length of patient hospital stay compared to Canadian average length of hospital stay
- Patients who left without being seen (LWBS) by an emergency department doctor
- Patients waiting in the emergency department for a hospital bed
- Hospital occupancy
- Patient experience
- Patient experience with staff introductions
- Patient experience with communication about follow-up care
- Patient experience with help for pain
- Communication with patients about possible side effects of medicines
- Patient reason for emergency department visit
- Overall patient experience with emergency department communication
- Overall rating of care
- Highlight Meaningful Changes
- Wait times
- Hospital Care
- Delivery of care
- Patient experience
- Overall rating of care
- Patient experience with talking with staff about help needed at home
- Patient experience with staff helping with pain
- Patient experience with information about their condition and treatment
- Patient experience with involvement in care decisions
- Patient experience with communication with nurses and doctors
- Client experience
- Client experience with courtesy and respect
- Client experience with listening
- Client experience with reaching their case manager
- Client experience with case manager (help with community services)
- Client experience with care plan involvement
- Client experience with care plan meeting needs
- Client experience with independence (home set-up)
- Client experience with independence (staff encouragement)
- Client experience with personal care staff capability
- Client experience with communication about a visit cancellation
- Client experience with pain management
- Client experience with reviewing medications
- Client experience with help to stay at home
- Client experience with family doctor being informed
- Client overall care experience
- Delivery of Care
- Resident Experience
- Resident experience of staff treating them with respect
- Resident experience with decision-making
- Resident experience with food
- Resident experience with getting their healthcare needs met
- Resident experiences with staff dependability
- Resident experiences with sharing concerns
- Resident experiences with feeling safe
- Resident experience with personal connections with staff
- Resident experiences with independence
- Resident experiences with rules
- Resident experiences with activities
- Resident overall experience
- Family experience
- Family experience with courtesy and respect
- Family experience with decision-making
- Family experience with food
- Family experience with healthcare services and treatments
- Family experience with resident cared for by the same staff
- Presence of a resident and family council
- Family experience with sharing concerns
- Family experience with staffing
- Family overall rating of care
- Clinical care
- Symptoms of delirium
- Mood worsened from symptoms of depression
- Behavioural symptoms improved
- Inappropriate use of antipsychotics
- Worsening pain
- New pressure ulcers
- Physical restraint use
- Unexplained weight loss
- Cognitive performance
- Frailty and risk of health decline
- Potential depression
- Activities of daily living
- Delivery of care
- Family experience
- Family experience with courtesy and respect
- Family experience with decision-making
- Family experience with food
- Family experience with healthcare services and treatments
- Family experience with resident cared for by the same staff
- Family experience with presence of a resident and family council
- Family experience with sharing concerns
- Family experience with staffing
- Family experience with staff responsiveness
- Family overall rating of care


Hospital Care
Overall rating of care
Patients’ average overall rating of experience with hospital care from (worst care possible [0] to best care possible [100]). (see data definition)
- *Data courtesy of Alberta Health Services.
What do you see?
- What opportunities do these results highlight for care providers and decision makers to develop improvement initiatives?
- Are there differences in patient experiences between hospitals of the same type (e.g., Large Urban)?
- Smaller hospitals (e.g., those listed as Remaining Hospitals under the ‘Choose Hospital Type’ filter in the shaded column) have fewer experience survey responses compared to larger hospitals. As a result, graphs for these hospitals may show big differences between data points (e.g., 100 per cent to a much lower percentage). Please interpret these results cautiously.
Why is it meaningful?
- Whether you’re a patient, provider, or health system administrator, thinking about this measure can start conversations and lead to solutions for improved quality of healthcare.
- Do you see successes worth highlighting or opportunities for improvement?
Understanding “overall hospital rating”
Surveying patients about their hospital experiences provides a voice for patients about the quality of their care. A key part of their experience and assessing quality of care is to ask patients about their overall rating of the hospital in which they received care.
Alberta Health Services (AHS) asked patients the following question:
Using any number from 0 to 10, where 0 is the worst hospital possible and 10 is the best hospital possible, what number would you use to rate this hospital during your stay?
For this question, the patient could a number between 0 and 10.
Considerations when viewing the results
A patient’s overall hospital rating is one of the best ways to understand a summary of the patient’s experience related to multiple aspects of care. Reviewing the results of this survey question in combination with the other questions helps to provide insights into what is shaping patients’ overall experiences with their hospital care.
- How does the overall hospital rating compare to the other survey results?
- To help understand overall hospital rating, consider looking at other patient experience survey results for context.
- What factors may be influencing how patients rate the hospital? Research has shown that this can be related to demographic (e.g. age, sex, level of education), as well as clinical factors (e.g. length of stay).
About the survey
AHS conducts a telephone survey with a random sample of patients from 93 hospitals across Alberta. The responses collected in the survey are analyzed by AHS, and the results to this question, and several others, are shared with the HQCA. The HQCA then posts updated results on this website every quarter (three months). See our methodology page to learn more about the survey methodology.
Alberta Quality Matrix for Health
The Health Quality Council of Alberta uses the Alberta Quality Matrix for Health as a way of organizing information and thinking around the complexity of the healthcare system. This measure can be used as input to assess the hospital performance in these dimensions of quality: Acceptability and Appropriateness.