Patient experience with involvement in care decisions | HQCA Focus

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Patient experience with involvement in care decisions

Percentage of patients who reported being “always” involved in care decisions. (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?
  • What trends and comparisons can help address information gaps to improve patient-centred care at the various hospital types?
  • Can this data help facilitate peer-to-peer learning and sharing of best practices?
  • 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 “patient involvement in care decisions”

Surveying patients about their hospital experiences provides a voice for patients about the quality of their care. A key part of their experience can be determined by how often patients were involved in decisions about their care.

Alberta Health Services (AHS) asked patients the following question:

How often were you involved as much as you wanted to be in decisions about your care and treatment during this hospital stay?

For this question, the patient could choose “never”, “sometimes”, “usually”, “always”, or “not applicable”. In the chart above, the percentage of patients who responded “always” is displayed.

Considerations when viewing the results

As care providers work to develop a better understanding of how they could improve this aspect of care, other questions can be asked, such as:

  • How do patients want to be involved in their care? This may differ based on the decisions that need to be made or the life context of the patient.
  • What is important to the patient regarding their care?
  • How is decision making shared with the patient? Does the patient feel ownership over the decisions made?

Understanding 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 hospital performance in these dimensions of quality: Acceptability and Appropriateness.

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