Patient experience with information about their condition and treatment | HQCA Focus

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Patient experience with information about their condition and treatment

Percentage of patients who felt they received all of the information they needed about their condition and treatment. (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?
  • How can this data help improve patient experiences with gaps in information?
  • 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 “information about condition and treatment”

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 felt they received all of the information they needed about their condition and treatment.

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

During this hospital stay, did you get all the information about your condition and treatment?

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

Patients may have varying needs and expectations about how much information is shared with them. Sharing information with the patient about their condition and treatment may assist informed decision-making.

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, Appropriateness, and Safety.

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