Patient experience with staff helping with pain | HQCA Focus

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Patient experience with staff helping with pain

Percentage of patients who reported hospital staff “always” helped them with pain. (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 “staff helped with pain”

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 healthcare providers helped patients with their pain.

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

During this hospital stay, how often did hospital staff do everything they could to help you with your pain?

For this question, the patient could choose “never”, “sometimes”, “usually”, or “always”. In the chart above, the percentage of patients who responded “always” is displayed.

Considerations when viewing the results

Many patients experience pain while in hospital. If patients are in pain, they are likely to have a poor experience. Improving patients’ experience is very important to improving the healthcare system overall. Whether or not the care patients receive is respectful and responsive to their needs and expectations is an important part of healthcare quality.

If pain is managed, patients’ overall experience will be more favourable.

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

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